KwaZulu-Natal - As food prices increase, poor households would increasingly be unable to buy necessary staples and would have to eat less or employ some other survival strategy, the Pietermaritzburg Agency for Christian Social Awareness said on Tuesday.
The NGO released its annual food price barometer report to coincide with UN World Food Day on Tuesday.
The agency looked at the increase in the price of 32 basic household items needed to feed a family of seven and how this affected the ability of poor households to access sufficient food.
Items in the basket included sugar beans, cheese, maize meal, Rama margarine, Ace samp, brown sugar, powdered milk and eggs.
Mervyn Abrahams, a director at the agency, said the report documented food price fluctuations between September last year and September this year at four retail stores in Pietermaritzburg that catered for the poor. The findings were nationally applicable, he emphasised.
The food basket cost R1 277 last year and R1 345 this year.
Abrahams said that food remained unaffordable for most households when considered alongside other expenditure like municipal services, transport, education and health. A household living off a R1 200 pension would be unable to afford all the products in the basket, while a household with two pensioners would spend 56 percent of its income on the basket.
Food products that reflected an upward movement in price this year included dairy, cereals, fats and oils. The highest price increase recorded was for sugar beans.
“Beans are an important protein substitute for more expensive meat proteins like chicken and beef,” Abrahams said.
The consumer price index (CPI), as measured by Statistics SA, stood at 5.7 in September last year and peaked at 6.3 at the end of January. It declined five points in August.
Abrahams said that although food price inflation declined this year, the future pointed to its increasing. Ensuring access to sufficient and nutritious food should therefore be a priority for SA.
“We need to find mechanisms to make food more affordable… we suggest that public policy responses should focus on four areas,” he said.
These were: ensuring that staple foods were affordable, creating employment, increasing support for small-scale farmers so they increased agricultural production, and providing adequate safety nets for those who most felt the effect of high food prices.
When it came to the food price outlook for next year, Abrahams said that most local and international food research agencies forecast increases in food inflation in the last quarter of this year and into next year.
Zola Saphetha, Cosatu’s KZN provincial executive committee member, who was the keynote speaker at the release of the food report, said high oil prices would add to the economic pressure on SA.
Saphetha added that commercial farmers needed to be given more support from government. Many were giving up and leaving the country.
The Mercury