Increased consumer prices for food, except for fresh vegetables |
14/09/2017 |
In the period from May to July, consumers were confronted with increasing food prices. Only prices for fresh vegetables were lower (-4%). The strongest increase was 5% for eggs, which further increased in August due to the fipronil affair. The prices of potatoes, beef and chicken increased in the period from May to July by about 2% and those of pork and dairy by about 1%. This means consumer prices for dairy reached a record high. The least increase was recorded for bread, which amounted to less than 0.5%. Consumer prices for potatoes, milk and yoghurt, eggs, beef and chicken were more than 5% higher than in the summer of 2016. Producer prices offer a picture of the development in prices at which supermarkets buy. Strikingly, producer prices hardly changed. Only the producer price of eggs was 2% higher in July and that of beef 4% lower than in May. Farm-gate prices show much larger fluctuations. For instance, the price of potatoes was almost 11% lower than in May and 9% below last year's level. Price changes in the various links in the chain do not always run parallel.Take the consumer price for chicken, which steadily increased from 2016, whereas the producer price and the farm-gate price decreased in the same period. These are some of the results of the Food Price Monitor of Wageningen Economic Research and Statistics Netherlands, which monitors the prices of a number of products in three links of the chain: consumer price, producer price and farm-gate price. The information is quantified and updated monthly and this time a period of three months is explained. |