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Food prices in SA too high, Competition Commission finds

By: Natasha Archary

food prices
Image: Pixabay on Pexels

Food prices in South Africa is too high, the Essential Food Pricing Monitoring (EFPM) report by the Competition Commission finds.

The report, released on Wednesday, 13 September, found that South African food prices increased by 9% from June 2021 to June 2022, and are continually increasing at a rate last seen during the 2016 drought.

Pricing trends for bread, maize meal, and margarine were considered in the report, and global food inflation remains a concern.

Inflation and particularly food inflation has emerged as a cause for concern among policymakers and consumers around the world.

Price of maize

The price of 2.5kg of maize meal in June 2022 was R33.61 and increased from R26.65 in January 2022.

This is a significant increase of 27%, and maize meal retail prices have become more volatile since June 2020.

For example, from January 2019 to December 2019, the retail price of maize meal increased from R18.62 to R21.70 (16%) and
over the same period in 2020, retail prices went from R22.11 to R25.51 (15%).

However, in 2021 prices fell by 8% going from R26.72 to R24.54 over the year.

Cooking oil surge

There has been a general increase in the retail price of cooking oil over this period. In January 2020, 750ml of cooking oil cost R21.95 and by January 2022 the price surged to R31.12.

CPI over this period increased by 9%, yet the cost for cooking oil spiked by 41%.

There was a modest increase in the price of cooking oil from January 2022 to March 2022 of a few cents.

Bread

The price for white bread generally fluctuated between R4.30 and R4.80 since April 2020 when there was an increase in the retail price of white from R13.66 in March 2022 to R14.43 in April 2020.

This retail price increase was not accompanied by an increase in the producer price.

The widening was caused by a steep decline in producer prices which went from R11.71 in August 2019 to R10.08 (16%) in September 2019 and which was not passed on by retailers to consumers.

Margarine

The price of a margarine brick has increased from R25.21 in January 2022 to R26.88 in June 2022.

A lack of producer price data for margarine means that we cannot assess whether the price spread has behaved in the same way as cooking oil over the past few months, i.e., fell steeply.

This is likely to be the case considering that sunflower oil forms a large part of the input costs for margarine production.

However, it is noteworthy that the increase of 6% is significantly lower than the increase in the retail or producer price of cooking oil discussed above.

Also read: Average age of first-time home owners keeps going up

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