GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

As ris­ing cost in food con­tin­ues to be a con­cern for cit­i­zens, econ­o­mist Prof Roger Ho­sein is ad­vis­ing that one of the key in­fla­tion rates this coun­try needs to look at is that of food prices, stat­ing that this has in­creased by around 43 per cent since 2015.

Speak­ing on CNC3’s Morn­ing Brew pro­gramme yes­ter­day he ex­plained, “If you have a rel­a­tive­ly fixed in­come and food prices go up, for a cat­e­go­ry of low-in­come house­holds, food is the first place they spend their mon­ey. So that if food prices are go­ing up, and it has gone up about 43 per cent since 2015, that is some­thing for the man and woman of the street to be very con­cerned about.”

He added this in­crease con­tin­ues to af­fect not on­ly the dis­pos­able in­come of the or­di­nary per­son but al­so their con­sump­tion.

In look­ing at in­creas­es in food prices and al­so that of the in­fla­tion rate, Ho­sein said cer­tain fac­tors need to be tak­en in­to con­sid­er­a­tion.

“You must take not on­ly the rate in one month or two months but al­so the lev­el across a cer­tain time pe­ri­od giv­en that in­comes have been fixed or on­ly mar­gin­al­ly in­creased in the last 10 years in Trinidad and To­ba­go. So that re­al in­come in Trinidad and To­ba­go is down, when you com­pare the growth of nom­i­nal wages with the growth in prices say since 2015 some peo­ple are un­der more pres­sure than be­fore,” Ho­sein fur­ther ex­plained.

Two weeks ago, the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice (CSO), in its lat­est Con­sumer Price In­dex Re­port, re­port­ed food prices in­dex went up by 1.34 per cent be­tween Sep­tem­ber 2023 and Sep­tem­ber 2024. The over­all in­fla­tion rate re­mained steady at 0.4 per cent for the month of Sep­tem­ber.

In the CSO’s in­fla­tion re­port, the sub in­dex for food and non-al­co­holic bev­er­ages in­creased from 149.2 in Au­gust 2024 to 150.2 in Sep­tem­ber 2024, re­flect­ing an in­crease of 0.7 per cent.

“This was the re­sult of in­creas­es in the prices of fresh whole chick­en, cu­cum­bers, car­rots, par­boiled rice, or­anges, Irish pota­toes, bo­di, cab­bage, ripe ba­nanas and ched­dar cheese,” the CSO re­port ex­plained.

The re­port al­so not­ed, how­ev­er, that price drops in some oth­er foods soft­ened the full im­pact of these price in­creas­es, name­ly: “…the gen­er­al de­creas­es in the prices of ochroes, onions, white flour, hot pep­pers, pump­kin, gar­lic, green sweet pep­pers, choco­late malt bev­er­ages, eggs and ed­does.”

When com­pared with Au­gust 2024, the Sep­tem­ber da­ta showed in­creas­es in the sub-in­dices for al­co­holic bev­er­ages and to­bac­co of 0.3 per cent and for health of 0.2 per cent. There al­so was a de­crease in the sub-in­dex for cloth­ing and footwear of 0.2 per cent, while all oth­er sec­tions re­mained un­changed.