Tucking into vol-au-vents stuffed with mozzarella, delegations from 162 countries gathered in Rome this week to attempt to map a way out of the current global food crisis.

There will never be a better commodities buying opportunity than there is right now… read on to discover where I think your money should be.

The United Nations announced yesterday (Wednesday) that an additional $20 billion would be needed each year to combat global hunger.

Billionaire investor George Soros has told Congress that the oil market is “a bubble in the making.”

“You hear it everywhere in the press… ‘Oil is in a bubble and it’s all down to speculators driving up the price,’” says Garry White in his Garry Writes newsletter.

“But I’m telling you now, they are all wrong. The real driver of the price of oil is supply and demand. Long-oil speculation is not rising – it’s actually falling.

A month ago, I wrote an article here in the A-Letter detailing the global food crisis. According to data from the World Bank, global food prices have soared 83% in the past three years alone.

A perfect storm is gathering that may make investing in a livestock ETF one of the best profit plays for 2008.

According to a report by Bloomberg, cattle prices may rise 13% by the end of the year on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Brazil’s Bolsa de Mercadorias e Futuros. More from this story:

Not since 1996, when corn reached what was then a record $5 a bushel, have cattle been this cheap relative to their primary source of feed.

The rising US inflation rate is dampening policy makers’ appetite for more Fed rate cuts, even if the economy sinks into a recession, according to recently released minutes of its last policy meeting. This from MarketWatch:

Surging prices for gasoline, food and other commodities forced the Fed to sharply boost its inflation outlook for this year, but not for next year. At the same time, their forecast for economic growth this year was revised much lower this year, with a rebound next year still in the cards.

Agricultural commodities won’t drop back to pre-crisis levels for at least ten years, according to a report by the OECD and the UN. This from the Financial Times:

Food prices have undergone a paradigm shift and will not drop back to pre-crisis levels for at least the next 10 years, putting long-term pressure on governments facing the food crisis, according to a forthcoming report.

The time is right to invest in a livestock ETF. Livestock prices have remained cheap over because grain prices have remained low. But this has changed… and an ETF is a great way to play the upswing in livestock prices.

“Hogs, like most commodities, went nowhere for 30 years,” says Ian Davis in The Growth Stock Wire. “In 1977, hogs sold for about 55.5 cents per pound. Today hogs sell for only about 79 cents per pound. That’s a rise of 42% in 31 years, or an annualized return of 1.1%… well below the inflation rate.

Amidst all the furore regarding the Labour administration’s embarrassingly mis-managed tax shortcomings, the cries of those in the UK warning of a growing humanitarian crisis in the developing world have been lost.