Primary commodities are products which have been only minimally processed—agricultural foods which may either be directly consumed or form an input into the food-processing industries, industrial raw materials which may either be agricultural (e.g. natural rubber) or mineral (mainly metals), and, most of important of all, petroleum and petroleum products. Primary commodity prices are variable (section II), and in part this variability is the result of macroeconomic fluctuations in the industrial ized countries. Rises in commodity prices will, to a greater or lesser extent, feed through into inflation.