The 2014 PACSA Food Price Barometer shows that a basket of 32 foods which form the basic foods in the shopping trolleys of poor working class households in Pietermaritzburg increased from R1509.34 to R1640.05 in September 2014, an increase of 8.66% year-on-year.  The increase on PACSA’s food basket of 8.66% mirrors the rising trends in high food price inflation (9.4%) which are driving the inflation on Statistics South Africa’s Consumer Price Index (CPI).  The 2014 PACSA Food Price Barometer has shown that as economic pressures increase on households and certain foods became unaffordable, households substitute those foods for cheaper products. These cheaper products have now become unaffordable leaving households with no further choices but hunger (maize meal increased by 6.98%, brown bread by 8.51%, cake flour by 13.88%, potatoes by 29.42%, chicken by 17.45%, cabbage by 19.25%, fresh milk by 21.64%).  The protests that are mushrooming across the country and the increasingly protracted and violent wage strikes are indicative of the situation in which workers can no longer afford to feed their families on their low wages. Unless wages can increase and food prices and the costs of electricity, transport and household debt come down the working class poor will fast approach its tipping point and we will enter a new age of hunger riots and food protests.

ABOUT THE REPORT:  Pietermaritzburg Agency for Community Social Action (PACSA) has been tracking the prices of a basket of 32 basic foods from 4 different retail supermarkets which service the lower-income market in Pietermaritzburg  since 2005 and have issued the PACSA Food Price Barometer report since 2006. PACSA’s food price barometer is important because it is the only index in South Africa which tracks food price inflation specifically for low-income households.  PACSA enriches this data with conversations with Pietermaritzburg women to test the credibility of its findings as well as to get a sense of the real experiences around food price increases.  The report therefore provides extremely valuable insights into how the majority of our people are experiencing economic pressures.