What Is Bread Saying In The Market? Making Sense Of Nigeria’s 23.12% Rising Food Inflation
Fred, Okikiola, a 35-year-old banker with a monthly income of ₦110,000, spends about ₦20,000 on transport fares monthly while food and other basic needs struggle for the paltry leftover of ₦90,000 from his monthly income.
To save cost, Fred prefers to eat bread at work alongside any other asides he deemed fit for the day: beans with plantain and egg, margarine and sardine, groundnut with soft drinks, etc Lately, however, he has cut down on the asides due to the rising cost of bread.
Like Fred, the daily meal of millions of Nigerians is being constantly altered by the rising food inflation.
A 2018 report by the Journal of Food Processing & Technology says bread is the second most consumed food in Nigeria after rice. In the past two years, however, its price has gone up side-by-side with Nigeria’s inflation rate.
On Thursday, September 15, 2022, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released its consumer price index (CPI) report for August 2022. The index, which measures the rate of change in prices of goods and services, surged to 20.52 per cent for the month which was up from 19.64 per cent in July. It was the highest since 2005.
According to NBS, “food inflation rose to 23.12 per cent in August 2022 on a year-on-year basis, representing a 2.82 per cent increase when compared to 20.30 per cent in August 2021. This rise in the food inflation was caused by increases in prices of BREAD (emphasis mine) and cereals, food products like potatoes, yam and other tubers, fish, meat, oil and fat.”
In 2020, the price of a standard loaf of bread was ₦350, by 2022, it has gone up to ₦750, a 114 per cent increase in two years
So what is it about bread that the price has continued to surge since 2020, thereby reflecting Nigeria’s rising inflation?
“Every single ingredient that goes into making bread has gone up. That’s the simple answer”, Faleke Abiodun, a baker in the Agege area of Lagos, told Neusroom. “Flour, sugar, salt, diesel, firewood, nylon; all of them have gone up so bad that even at the price we are selling it, our profit margin is lower. We were making more money two years ago when it looked like the price was cheaper than we are making this year despite the high price, and I can tell you it will soon go up if the price of the ingredients continues to rise.”
So what has changed in the past two years? Abiodun provided a breakdown.
Flour (50kg) used to be sold for ₦7,000 but is now ₦31,000. The price of sugar (50kg) rose from ₦11,000 to ₦29,500. Printing on nylon is now ₦10 from ₦2.50. Diesel moved from ₦100 to ₦800 per litre. ₦100 worth of firewood is now ₦700. Salt, which sold for ₦2,800, is now ₦5,000.
“It’s not just the price customers complain about,” said Iya Mariam, who sells bread as a retailer at Alhaja junction in the Agege area of Lagos. “Customers complain that the bread has lost its weight and that bread that they would eat in two or three sittings in the past can be finished in one sitting.”
Fred says: “What we call family-sized bread before is what I and my wife alone now eat. We buy another family-sized bread for the three children. In the past, the whole family eats one, and we would be satisfied. If you open one big loaf of bread now, you can hide another loaf inside, and nobody will notice because it is lean and has no substance inside.”
Despite the continued rise in the cost of bread, demand and consumption are still on the rise. Over 75 million food portions consumed daily in Nigerian homes are wheat, with 60 per cent of it going into bread production. It still remains a staple food, and while many groan over its high cost and shrinking size, they still buy it.
