I was having lunch with my friend and colleague Andrew Mickey, and our conversation turned to a New York Times article about Wall Street hot shots turning to farming.

Yes, it sounds like a pitch for a remake of the Green Acres TV comedy, but this is a high-stakes twist on a global agri-boom.

The current food crisis sees no letting up, creating opportunities for investors accustomed to commodities such as oil, natural gas and metals. As the Times reported, the largest investment funds have already poured hundreds of billions of dollars into wheat, corn and soybeans.

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The Taipan Emerging Market Index is up today 44.2%, a huge gain from last week when it was virtually flat with an uptick of 0.52%. By comparison, this week saw the S&P 500 up 0.9% while the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 5.3% as of this writing.

Key
ALL ORDINARIES IDX (ASX: ^AORD) Australia
BSE SENSEX (Bombay: ^BSESN) India
IBOVESPA SAO PAULO (^BVSP) Brazil
EGYPT CMA GENL INDX (Cairo: ^CCSI) Egypt
HANG SENG INDEX (HKSE: ^HSI) Hong Kong
COMPOSITE INDEX (Jakarta: ^JKSE) Jakarta
COMPOSITE INDEX (Kuala Lumpur: ^KLSE) Kuala Lumpar
KOSPI Composite Index (KSE: ^KS11) South Korea
MERVAL BUENOS AIRES (Buenos Aires: ^MERV) Argentina
IPC (Mexico: ^MXX) Mexico
NZX 50 INDEX GROSS (NZSE: ^NZ50) New Zealand
IGBM (Madrid: ^SMSI) Spain
TEL-AV TASE-100 IND (^TA100) Israel
TSEC weighted index (Taiwan: ^TWII) Taiwan
SSE Composite Index (Shanghai: 000001.SS) Shanghai
iShares MSCI South Africa Index (EZA) South Africa
RTSI INDEX (RUS: RTS.RS) Russia
ISHARES MSCI THAILAN (NYSEArca: THD) Thailand
iShares MSCI Turkey Invest Mkt Index (TUR) Turkey

Our index shows one thing clearly. When it comes to Big Media’s news rant about wild inflation in emerging markets, you’re not getting the full story. Despite double-digit inflation in resource-rich Russia, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia, there is still money to be made from the oil, natural gas and other commodities that these countries export to the rest of the world.

The news gap between what you read in Big Media and what our index proves is that inflation impacts the man on the street. Commodities, meanwhile, contribute to the inflation through rising prices that are making investors rich.

With commodities, it’s very possible that the gains you realize far outstrip the corrosive effects of inflation.

For example, our big winner today is Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index (HKSE: ^HSI). It was largely driven by gains in coal, oil and shipping. ^HSI is a perfect illustration of what I just mentioned about the disconnect between inflation and market gains in economies fueled by the commodity boom.

If you look at the big winners in the ^HSI, notably oil and shipping, they are the culprits blamed for global inflation. And if you had money in ^HSI, your gains could have been much higher than the rate of inflation — putting you ahead.

Sure, you’re feeling the pain of spiking prices in gas, groceries and utilities. But investors are still making money in emerging markets. Are you?

Have a great weekend.

–Irwin Greenstein

An article in Business News Americas may tip off investors to a profit gusher in Mexico.

Their small piece I saw yesterday reported that Mexico could take front and center in an important investment conference this September. If some of the news we expect is actually announced, it could be one of the biggest bombshells to hit Latin oil.

At the Latin Asia Business Forum 08 (LAB08) held in Singapore from September 22-23, Mexican officials could detail their progress on rewriting the legal framework for private investments in state-owned oil.

Mexico’s LAB08 presentations could detail initiatives that would let foreign companies have greater participation in public-works projects for transportation, telecommunications and energy development.

And it’s the energy development that caught our eye. As I write this, a revamp of Mexico’s national oil company is being pushed by President Felipe Calderon.

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There are those who will tell you that oil is a cyclical business and a global fungible commodity. It rises and falls with the business phase. If you look at a hundred-year chart, it is as obvious as a sidewinder on a sand dune. A sine wave through time — up and down in seven-year cycles.

But there are others who believe in the “Peak Oil” argument, the ultimate end-game, like a Suburban crushing a Subaru at the end of a long hill. Peak Oil enthusiasts will point to long lists of numbers, detailed maps of known reserves, past prognosticators of genius, and declare with tinfoil-hat fervor that “we are running out of oil.”

I’ve read these books and listened to the speeches. The idea that there is a finite amount of oil on the planet, and we are near the point where we will extract less in the next hundred years than we did in the past. Makes sense to me, as does the business cycle. I don’t know if the hundred-year history of the oil cycle is over. There is always a “this time it’s different” ideology at the peak. But then again, sometimes, it is different.

What we do know — what isn’t in dispute — is that oil is expensive, and that by all accounts the easy oil has already been found and is being extracted at a furious pace.

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