A year of coronavirus pandemic saw a pot of jollof rice and other stable meals grow steadily more expensive in the Nigerian markets.
At Nyanya Market, near Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, the price of the rice that forms the base for the dish went up by 10 per cent.
The FAO’s food index price last hit this high in 2011. Some analysts have linked sharply rising bread prices in countries including Egypt and Syria to the unrest that took place during the Arab Spring.
But the relationship between international food prices and unrest is affected by numerous factors. Global prices, like the FAO index tracks, and the price that a consumer pays are rarely in sync.
Governments have good reason to fear rising food prices. The World Bank recently warned that high food prices could force seven million Nigerians into poverty and food prices have become a rallying cry for grass-roots opposition leaders.
Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior FAO economist who helped devise the food price index, said that while of the factors causing rising prices may be fading in the short term, in the longer term the trend is worsening volatility, because of geopolitical rivalries and climate change.
If the food prices keep rising, those hit hardest will be “consumers in emerging markets and developing economies still wrestling with the effects of the pandemic,” the International Monetary Fund warned recently.
“Global prices affect prices in local markets throughout the world to an unprecedented degree,” Hendrix said.
With the possibility of droughts over summer in the northern hemisphere growing regions such as the United States, Hendrix said, consumers around the world could be “looking at a really, really disturbing picture moving into fall.”
A small tin of tomatoes? Twenty-nine percent costlier. And the onions? Their price jumped by a third, according to a Nigerian research firm.
Surging consumer food prices are a local problem — and a global one.
In Russia, an increase in pasta prices left President Vladimir Putin boiling. In India, it’s cooking oil, and in Lebanon, bread. In meat-loving Argentina, the cost of some cuts of beef has doubled, and beef consumption is at an all-time low.
The issue has made headlines the world over, including in the United States, where inflation has climbed to five per cent, the highest level in 13 years.
The numbers are not rising uniformly, and analysts caution that higher food prices are not always bad news. But when disproportionately increasing food costs intertwine with other economic and social factors, the results can be hard to swallow.
