Too early to tell Katrina's effect on food prices.

Hurricane Katrina is pushing up commodity chicken and coffee prices after the storm idled bean-roasting plants and wiped out bird growers in Mississippi and Louisiana. But it is too soon to tell whether consumers will pay more at restaurants and supermarkets. Hundreds of chicken-growing houses were damaged or destroyed during the storm, and at least one of Mississippi's 14 processing plants remained closed as of yesterday, according to the National Chicken Council. The nation's largest chicken producers said the storm killed millions of chickens and could slow their operations for months.

American consumers, however, will benefit from chickens that would have been exported had they not gotten stranded by the storm when port facilities were shuttered. Those birds could offset the tighter supplies and keep consumers from seeing higher prices. The coffee industry is still trying to determine whether water damaged 1.6 million 132-pound bags of green coffee sitting in New Orleans warehouses. New Orleans stores about one-sixth of the nation's coffee, according to industry estimates.