Surging fruit and vegetable costs in South Africa make it increasingly difficult for Lynn Pillay to buy healthy food for her family, and she’s turned to smaller, independent stores in poorer neighbourhoods to try to find cheaper produce.
“It’s tough being a South African these days,” said the 43-year-old mother of two, who lives in Bedfordview in eastern Johannesburg but regularly travels to Lenasia about 40km away to do her grocery shopping.
While food prices have gone up across the board, they’ve risen disproportionately for fresh produce. The cost of green peppers jumped 16% over the past month, the biggest rise of any single ingredient across Bloomberg’s Shisa Nyama Index, followed by onions and spinach at 11%.
Crunching data from the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity group (PMBEJD), the index tracks the prices of some of the ingredients in a traditional South African braai, also known as a shisa nyama. Onions, carrots, tomatoes, curry powder, salt, beef and wors are among the other items that make up the index.
The gauge shows prices rose 20.3% on average in April from a year earlier. That surpassed the 7.1% year-on-year official headline inflation rate in March and a 14.4% increase in food costs. South Africa’s central bank expects food inflation to average 9.9% this year.
Higher fuel prices and blackouts have contributed to rising input costs for food, research conducted by the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy shows.
The PMBEJD tracks food prices in supermarkets in Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town, Pietermaritzburg, the northwestern town of Springbok and the far northeastern town of Mtubatuba. Its data shows that 2kg of green peppers is most expensive in Mtubatuba at R99.97, followed by Cape Town at R69.18. A 6kg bag of tomatoes costs the most in Springbok, at R167.94 last month, followed by R157,94 in Mtubatuba. — Bloomberg
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