Janiel McEwan | How a global price becomes a local one

A woman in a Montego Bay supermarket taps her card and watches the total come back higher than she expected, not dramatically, just enough to make her check the receipt twice against a basket of groceries she buys most months of the year.

The explanation for that number did not begin at the register, and it did not begin in Jamaica. It began in a wheat field battered by heat on the American Plains, in a Ukrainian port under fire, in a cane field in Brazil running short on rain, and in a currency market thousands of miles from where she is standing.

This is the story of how that distance closes, of how weather, war and shipping schedules on the other side of the world quietly become a number on a Jamaican receipt.