Primark expects the soaring price of cotton to "erode" some of the uplift in profit margins the discount fashion retailer delivered in its last financial year.

Fresh doubts have been raised about the economy's ability to absorb quickly the thousands of public-sector workers who will soon be made redundant as a result of spending cuts.

Louis Dreyfus, one of the world's top commodity firms, is in merger talks with its Singapore-based smaller rival Olam International in what could extend Dreyfus's global reach and open up its closely held family ownership.

A bread price increase will be reversed after food riots in which 13 people were killed last week, Mozambique's Planning Minister said yesterday.

Climate peril: is it too late?

So far as the public is concerned, things have been quiet on the genome front since the great celebrations in 2003 when 13 years of work to sequence human DNA was completed. The result was a map of the 20,000 or more genes found in the 23 pairs of chromosomes which are the blueprint for the life of Homo sapiens. In the interim, scientists have sequenced the genes of a wide range of living things, from monkeys and chimps through cats and dogs to mice and rice. But now they have sequenced something which is three times as complex as the human genome and which could lead to cheaper bread throughout the world within just five years.

Few technological leaps forward are unalloyed good news in economic terms, and so it is with the decoding of the wheat genome.

While doing your weekly shop you have probably noticed the price of bread going up – this is due, in part, to wheat soaring on the international exchanges as Russia, a major exporter, is wracked by its worst drought in a century.

Bakery chain Greggs has added its name to the growing list of companies warning that a sharp increase in the cost of commodities such as wheat could result in price rises later this year, although Chief Executive Ken McMeikan pledged to try to limit the impact on consumers.