Government statistician, Prof. Samuel Kobina Annim, has counseled decision-makers to critically examine the issues causing the rise in food inflation.
He emphasized that compared to non-food inflation, food inflation has regularly increased by around 20 percentage points.
Speaking to journalists after revealing that June’s inflation rate jumped slightly to 42.5 percent from 42.2 percent in May, Prof. Annim stated that prices for everyday staple foods like vegetables and seafood have been rising over the past few months.
“At the minimum we see a widening of the gap between food and non-food inflation. We need to focus on why we see food inflation going up.
We have seen about a 20 percentage point change between food inflation and non-food inflation”, he said.
He mentioned that the price of food had risen by 54.2 percent more than the national average, with imports rising by 43.8 percent and domestically produced goods rising by 36.2 percent.