It seems like just another Monday. But the world always changes a little over the weekend. And this weekend, we reckon it changed a lot. The Opes story dominates the headlines. But the collapse of margin lending and leverage probably isn’t the biggest story this week. It’s the increase in food and energy prices we have our eye on this week.

But first, congratulations to Andrew Forrest! Ever since Lang Hancock and other pioneers opened up the Pilbara to the world in the 1950s, the region has been dominated by BHP Billiton (ASX: BHP) and Rio Tinto (ASX: RIO). Those two quarreling love birds have thus far owned all the rail and port infrastructure to export Australia’s red iron ore to China, Japan, and Korea.

The duopoly has become a triopoly as of this weekend. Fortescue Metals (ASX: FMG) completed the rail line between its Cloudbreak mine and its new port facilities on the coast. Fortescue still hasn’t actually shipped any iron ore yet. But the company can now get the iron ore from the mine to the sea. Its first shipment is scheduled for next month.

Don’t expect Fortescue to produce iron ore in the same volume as the big boys. But then, it doesn’t have to. The iron ore market has changed at the margin. Smaller steel makers in Asia are more than willing to enter into contract agreements with smaller ore producers in Australia.

This is a key feature (and opportunity) in the resource boom: the expansion of consumers has led to an expansion in producers. The marginal producers (some of them anyway) are now economically viable. The whole market is bigger, giving retail investors more to choose from in the share market.

Three billion people in the world eat rice as a staple of their daily diet. No wonder there are rice riots. Javier Blas of the Financial Times reports that, “Rice prices rose more than 10 per cent yesterday to a record high as African countries joined south-east Asian importers in the race to head off social unrest by securing supplies from the handful of exporters still selling the grain in the international market.”

Rice farmers are sitting on huge profits. It’s not complicated. There are more buyers than sellers. And the sellers are selling something pretty valuable: daily calories. This isn’t your garden variety shortage in video game consoles or iPhones.

“The rise in prices - 50 per cent in two weeks - threatens upheaval and has resulted in riots and soldiers overseeing supplies in some emerging countries… The increase also risks stoking further inflation in emerging countries, which have been suffering the impact of record oil prices and the rise in price of other agricultural commodities - including wheat, maize and vegetable oil - in the past year.”

“Bankruptcy filings jump 30%,” reports the Los Angeles times. “More than 90,000 bankruptcy filings were made in March, the highest since insolvency laws became more restrictive in October 2005,” the Times reports. “California led the nation with a 42% increase in bankruptcy filings at an annual pace in the first quarter, according to Jupiter ESources.”

California is always at the leading edge of American economic trends. This is not a good sign. The bankruptcy laws passed in 2005 were a big fat wet legislative kiss to the credit card companies. They make it very hard for Americans to declare bankruptcy. The fact that so many have anyway tells you how grim the situation is.

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