You may have noticed price hikes in the grocery aisles lately for a number of the goods that you buy regularly, particularly sugar, meat and coffee. The rise in food prices has been driven by a combination of factors that include increased demand from a rapidly growing middle class in India and China, market speculation and weather-related crop disasters such as the Australian flood. An exchange-traded fund (ETF) that aims to let you profit from rising food prices is PowerShares DB Agriculture (DBA).

This fund is designed to deliver investment results equal to the price and yield performance, before fees and expenses, of the Deutsche Bank Liquid Commodity Index - Optimum Yield Agriculture Excess Return. The DBA index consists of agricultural commodities such as cattle, cocoa, coffee, corn, hogs, soybeans, sugar and wheat. Basically, it contains the foods that the world consumes each and every day. From January 25, 2010, to January 25, 2011, DBA climbed 28.58%.

With soaring prices for corn and soybeans -- both commonly used in feed for cows and chicken -- meat and dairy prices also are rising. In the world’s most populous country of China, food prices have jumped more than 10% on an annual basis.

In fact, on a recent trip to the grocery store to buy some pantry basics, I was shocked to learn that two of my favorite brands had cut the sizes of the containers in an apparent attempt to boost profits, while the price of both remained the same! Tropicana orange juice just reduced the size of its 64-oz. container by 5 oz., while Haagen Dazs cut the size of its “pint” of ice cream to 14 ounces. Indeed, Kraft American Cheese slices have been reduced by two slices. The list keeps growing. The fact is that the dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to at the check-out counter.

Consumer Reports recently wrote, “From toothpaste to tuna fish, hot dogs to hand soap, companies have been shaving ounces and inches from packaged goods for years, usually blaming it on rising costs for ingredients and energy. They've got a point: Higher commodity and fuel costs are expected to cause a spike in food prices by as much as 3% in 2011.” And that does not bode well for consumers. But what’s bad for your wallet at the supermarket could mean enticing gains in your stock portfolio. The following stock chart shows the upward trajectory of DBA.

Subscribers to my ETF Trader service recently benefited from the trend when I advised them to buy the fund, before instructing them to take profits earlier this week. There could be further gains ahead in DBA, if you are willing to take the risk that its momentum is strong enough to fend off any market pullbacks.

For advice about which ETFs to buy and to sell, I urge you to sign up for my ETF Trader service. As always, I am pleased to answer any of your questions about ETFs, so don’t hesitate to contact me if you have one. To send a question to me, simply click here. You may just see your question answered in a future ETF Talk.