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Uganda: Food Prices in And Around Kampala Go Up
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The Monitor (Kampala)
22 March 2008
Posted to the web 21 March 2008
Elias Biryabarema & Andrew Bagala
In a shockingly short space of about three months, food prices in Kampala and towns across Uganda have shot up and urbanites, almost without noticing, have had their monthly food bills nearly double.
Prices of just about every food category - grains, bread, cereals, flour, vegetables, bananas, beef, fish and others - have inexplicably climbed up so sharply that consumer experts and economists seem confounded.
Kampalans flocking food stores and open markets like Nakasero and dozens of others dotting the city's suburbs have helplessly seen their disposable income erode away fast as they struggle to keep food on the table against a relentless price bubble.
Ms Edith Namirimu, a housewife and resident of Ntinda, a Kampala suburb, has shifted her shopping from Ntinda to Nakawa's open market where she claims prices are still lower.
The high prices, she said in an interview, have caused her already strained daily food budget to double from Shs10,000 to Shs20,000.
"If you have a big family of 10 people like mine and you are shopping groceries at that amount, you can't be able to provide your family a good meal," Ms Namirimu said.
She was inexact on when she started to notice that prices were fast increasing but said since late last year "market women started increasing their charges on most foods," and that the situation has been worsening since then.
A kilogram of beef now retails around Shs4,000 while fish goes for around the same amount, about Shs500 to Shs1,000 higher than its cost three months ago. Most grains and flour have also gone up by an average of Shs600.
While food prices are reported to be in an upward spiral globally (partly attributed to US's growing conversion of corn to ethanol), the Ugandan situation is strange in two aspects: the spike has no perceptible cause and it is not registering, as many would think should, on the country's inflation figures.
"I have taken interest in the steep rise of food prices in Uganda for a couple of weeks but I don't seem to have a cause for it. Am still observing," said a consumer affairs analyst and columnist Shaban Serunkuma.
What is baffling many is that there has not been a terrible drought, pest epidemic or great storms or any of the adversities that ordinarily cause drastic drops in crop harvests-- a circumstance that would create scarcity and engender surges in food prices.
And while Kenya's post-election chaos and the consequent brief escalation in fuel prices might explain the sharp rise in prices of imported foods, it does little in exposing the causes of similar rises that have occurred to most fresh foods and grains streaming into Kampala from rural Uganda.
Stunningly, the Executive Director of Uganda Bureau of Statistics, the Mr Male-Mukasa reported in February in that month's consumer price index survey that food prices had climbed only by a negligible 0.4 per cent implausibly attributing the rise to "low supplies to the markets, caused by seasonal factors."
It was not clear what slowed supplies since there have not been road-destroying deluges say in South Western Uganda, the region that produces much of the nation's food.
According to Bank of Uganda, food prices rose only dismally from minus 0.8 to 0.7 per cent between December 2007 and January 2008.
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The Bank didn't offer any elaborate explanation even for the modest rise they reported. A seemingly plausible argument offered by a range of other analysts suggests that Uganda could be facing disequilibrium in its population and food production balance.
Increasingly, some say, the food hauled into markets and stores is slowly but effectively getting outstripped by demand, particularly as the nation's urban population swells against an agriculture sector starved of money and sorely neglected by the NRM regime.
If that's the case, then Urban Uganda could be facing a protracted period of economic melancholy as ordinarily people grapple with a survival struggle of thread-bare incomes and costly food.
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