Government intervention in commodity trading may be needed, according to delegates at a Labour Party conference fringe event held in Manchester last week.

Responding to calls at the fringe meeting for government to exert more control over raw material costs to combat soaring prices, Melanie Leech, director general of the Food and Drink Federation, said: “Because there’s not a straight line between food producers and the rest of the food chain - there’s commodity trading in-between - maybe the government will need to look at a way of trying to intervene.”

While some delegates at the meeting suggested government interference in this area was unlikely, Leech added: “It would have been unthinkable a few years ago for the government to intervene in the financial markets in the way it has done in the past couple of weeks.”

The British Retail Consortium’s (BRC’s) food policy director Andrew Opie was also reported to have told the meeting that he didn’t think food prices would continue to rise. “The BRC was expecting prices to plateau, but not at the [lower] level of previous years,” Leech told Food Manufacture.