Food prices

Feb 20, 2025 Editorial, News

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Editorial…

Kaieteur News- Amid all the noise in this country-one thing has remained constant for the past years is that of rising food prices. The World Bank has said that food security continues to be at alarming levels in most low-income countries, Guyana not excluded.

The Bank said too that domestic food price inflation remains high in many low-income countries, noting that information from the latest month between October 2024 and January 2025 for which food price inflation data are available shows that inflation higher than 5% is experienced in 73.7% of low-income countries (1.5 percentage points higher since the last update on January 14, 2025), 52.2% of lower-middle-income countries (8.7 percentage points higher), 38% of upper-middle-income countries (no change), and 5.6% of high-income countries (1.8 percentage points lower). In real terms, food price inflation exceeded overall inflation in 56% of the 164 countries where data is available.

According to the Bank since its January 2025 update, agricultural and export price indices have risen, closing at 3% and 6% higher, respectively.  Here in Guyana, during the reading of the budget, Finance Minister, Dr. Ashni Singh noted that government has worked strategically to contain prices and cushion the impact on domestic consumers. He said the 12-month inflation rate at the end of 2024 was estimated at 2.9 percent, driven primarily by food prices, which rose by 5.6 percent and contributed 2.8 percentage points of the overall rate. Within food, vegetables and vegetable products accounted for 1 percentage point, while meat, fish, eggs, cereals and cereal products contributed 0.7 of a percentage point and 0.6 of a percentage point, respectively.

The steep rise in food prices over the past years has also no doubt worked wonders in focusing the minds of our fellow Guyanese on the value of money and perhaps pushed them into differentiating between their needs and wants. Faced with the prospect that even such basic items such as rice, flour, bora and plantains may be soon out of reach of the average worker, old and almost forgotten distinctions between wants and needs are rising to the fore. In Primary School, we had all been taught that the basic needs of mankind were food, clothes and shelter.

Love might have been mentioned but that was given short shrift – some did claim that it “made the world go around” but then we learnt about gravity and orbits. All else were wants, with the implication that they may be dispensed with. But what the average citizen is finding out is that the latter is easier said than done. Between the time when the basic needs were defined and today, our worldview has undergone quite a shift.

And this is not just a consequence of a widening of the list of needs by scientists such as Abraham Maslow with his inclusion of “higher-order” needs such as “self-actualisation” not to mention medium levels ones such as security etc. We are referring to the revolution occasioned by the introduction of “consumerism” and its facilitator, money as a feature of “modernisation”.

Karl Marx pointed out the danger early on: “The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my — the possessor’s—properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore, I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness — its deterrent power — is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore, I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good.”
Take the old, most basic need for food. Somewhere along the way we tied what we ate to who we were. And what we ate was determined by the money we had. In the colonial days, the Europeans decided that they would rather eat old, soft, sprouting Irish potatoes than the yams and cassava that provided the same carbohydrate nutrient values and we followed suit.

So today, we import millions of pounds of potatoes annually because we decide that we “need” just that source of carbohydrate. But we’ve gone a step further today. The TV beams the advertisements of the developed world directly into our living rooms and the old “colonial” mentality on food has deepened to levels that are astounding.

Even the markets in the countryside now offer fresh strawberries, cauliflower and broccoli flown in from “overseas”. And so on for clothes and shelter: we cannot just buy jeans; they must be Calvin Klein jeans. Clothes, food and shelter now literally “maketh” the man – and the woman.

In the worldview of consumerism, consumption becomes an end in itself and demand for particular products is dictated by impulses far removed from the basic needs. The specificity of consumption – which has to be facilitated by the possession of money – becomes the yardstick of an individual’s worth. The point we are attempting to highlight is an old one made by the authorities since the seventies: we have to wean ourselves away from the rampant consumerism that impels us to equate wants with needs. In addition to growing our own food we have to initiate a “get real” campaign that resists consumerism’s subversion of our liberty and turns us into automations of insatiable consumption. And it is not just about food: it is everything else.

(Food prices)

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• Editorial, food price inflation, low-income countries, rising food prices, upper-middle-income countries

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