FAO: Food prices continued to rise in April, making meat and vegetable oils more expensive

World food prices continued to rise in April, meat continues to become more expensive, and the price of vegetable oils and cereals also rose slightly. On the contrary, he made sugar and dairy products cheaper. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) stated this in its statement. Food prices have been falling since the beginning of this year, and their prices began to rise in March.

Aggregate index that tracks cereal prices, vegetable oils, dairy products, meat and sugar on international markets, climbed to 119.1 points in April, according to the FAO. That’s three-tenths of a percentage point higher than where the index was in March. The FAO revised the March index, initially giving it a value of 118.3 points. However, the index is 9.6 percent lower year-on-year.

Development of supply and demand

FAO also released an updated report on development of supply and demand for cereals. It estimates production for the 2023/2024 season at 2.846 billion tons, which is an increase of 1.2 percent compared to the previous season. Thus, the FAO increased the production estimate to date by five million tons, mainly due to updated information on rice cultivation in Burma and Pakistan.

“As a result, global rice production in the 2023/2024 season is expected to reach a new record of 529.2 million tonnes, which is 0.7 percent above the estimate for the 2022/2023 season. In addition, we have made slight upward revisions to the forecasts for the global corn and wheat production,” the report says.

Cereal stocks

FAO also assumes that the world grain stocks by the end of this year they will reach 890 million tons. Despite a downward revision of 4.6 million tonnes from the previous month, this is still 2.1 percent above the baseline. The downward revision is mainly due to the expected decline in corn stocks in Brazil and the United States, and to a lesser extent, the decline in barley stocks in Kazakhstan.