Guimaras’ August food Inflation climbs to 3%, fastest in 13-month

Guimaras’ annual rate of change in the prices of food commodities climbed to 3% in August 2021, the fastest in 13 months due to faster annual spike in the prices of five heavily weighted food commodity items, based on data released by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).

The food commodity items that posted higher marks up in August 2021 over 2020 prices, which contributed to the swift movement of inflation rate, were:

-Meat at 16.1% from -6.9% a year ago.

-Fish at 10.8% from 3.1%

-Oils and Fats at 8.4% from 6.7%

-Vegetables at 1.3% from -4.5%, and

-Sugar, Jam, Honey, Chocolate, and Confectionery at 1.7% from 1.2%

Compared to the July annual rate of change, only three food commodity groups registered higher price change compared to August 2021:

-Other Cereals, Flour, Cereal Preparation, Bread, Pasta & Other Bakery Products at 0.2%

-Meat at 16.6%, and

-Oils and Fats at 9.3%

Comparing inflation trends of Guimaras in 13 months, from August 2020- August 2021, the current 3.0% inflation rate is the fastest rate of change, 2.8 percentage points faster than the 0.2% recorded in August 2020 and 1.2 percentage points quicker than in July 2021, Provincial Statistics Officer Nelida B. Losare said.

The last five months of 2020 exhibited slower inflation reaching 0.5% only and recorded deflated rate of -1.2% in October.

In 2021, the annual rate of change started at a slower -0.5% in January, then jumped to 2% in February before sliding to 0.1% in March and further to -0.6% in April 2021, the slowest rate so far in the past eight months of 2021.

From then, inflation moved a bit faster at 0.2% in May, continually speeding up to 0.5% in June to 1.8% in July and 3% rate in August. (See Figure 1)

“The 3.0% inflation in August `2021 is the fastest rate of price movements for 13 months influenced by the price hikes on the five basics food commodity items which may be avoidably by increasing staple food supply for locally produced food items,” Losare said.

Losare also said that some of the primary food commodity items like vegetable, fish, and meat supplies came from Iloilo, which have entailed value-added costs of handling to Guimaras.