There is a view that we are now in the midst of the emergence of a new world food regime, characterised by three important and interrelated features – the rise of large corporate food empires with oligopolistic powers over entire food supply chains, the growing dominance of cash crops at the expense of food agriculture and the closer alignment of domestic market prices with international prices. There is also an ongoing debate about whether and how the 2007-08 price spike might have been driven by financial speculation in commodity markets, and the role it is playing in the current episode of excessive price volatility. This note critically examines the debate.