Silvia Letícia dos Santos, 46, is the owner of the restaurant ‘Comidas de Casa’, located in the Boca do Rio neighborhood. Every Wednesday, as soon as she finishes the establishment’s services, she sets aside time in her day to rotate in supermarkets , wholesalers, neighborhood markets and butchers in search of the best food prices for the next day’s meal.
Last Wednesday, the 24th, however, she stopped taking essential foods home, such as onions, garlic, tomatoes and peppers, due to the rise in prices. The next day, she had to wake up early to buy vegetables at a street market, which were five times cheaper.
“Every time you go to the market, everything is more expensive. Yesterday, at the supermarket I bought it for I think it was R$29.80/kg and today it was R$35/kg. Onions are priced at R$11.90/kg. As a result, I have to ‘dribble’ and rotate through establishments, in open-air markets in search of the best prices”, says the micro-entrepreneur.
Every day, Silvia changes the establishment’s menu. The stew is her restaurant flagship. The meal that includes vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, pumpkin and okra also worries the businesswoman who was shocked by the increase in prices, and especially with the passing on of the costs of her meals.
“I had stopped making stew here at the restaurant, because pumpkin has only now dropped in price after costing 8x more. And when the price is more expensive, and I pass the value on to customers, they don’t accept it. My lunch is at a popular price, so when I spend a difference of R$2, for example, they complain and I end up leaving it at the normal price so as not to lose the customer, because there is a lot of competition in the neighborhood”, she continues.
Currently, the products that make up Salvador’s basic food basket, structured by the Superintendency of Economic and Social Studies of Bahia (SEI), taking into account both the Family Budget Survey (POF) of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) include beans , rice, pasta, cassava flour, meat, chicken, chicken eggs, soybean oil, tomato, onion, potato, carrot, ground coffee, crystal sugar, French bread, corn flakes, milk and dairy products and fruits.
In the latest survey by the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies (Dieese), the price of the Basic Food Basket in Salvador was 620.13, an increase of 4.85% compared to the same period in 2023. In the first three months of 2024 , the cost of the basic food basket in the capital of Bahia increased by 10.58%.
In Salvador, the survey, which has been running for almost 40 years, selects more than 100 shopping locations – including super and hypermarkets, grocery stores, bakeries, butchers and fairs – every month. To obtain the monthly results, a Dieese researcher goes to the location, always on the same day of the week, in the same week and preferably, at the same time. In the capital of Bahia, 12 basic products are researched: beef, milk, carioquinha beans, rice, cassava flour, tomatoes, bread, coffee, bananas, sugar, oil and butter.
The products are basic, but the scare over food prices has discouraged Brazilians, who are increasingly reducing the volume of their shopping cart. But why are foods that were usually bought at affordable prices increasing costs so much?
Causes of discharges
The rise in prices is worrying, but there is a reason. Or rather, why. The main one is related to climate change, which has increased temperatures in several regions of Brazil. Heat waves were one of the main causes of damaging agricultural production.
“A series of factors end up influencing price increases. Climate change has always been an important issue in price formation, especially when there is a lot of rain and a lot of drought. Nowadays, we are experiencing, on a recurring basis, more extreme climate phenomena, such as floods, severe droughts, and above-average temperatures. It is no surprise that the products that rose the most in recent months were tomatoes and bananas, which are very susceptible to these weather conditions”, explains Ana Georgina Dias, Technical Supervisor at Dieese-BA.
In the second half of 2023, the Federation of Agriculture and Livestock of Bahia (FAEB) warned of losses due to climate change, especially the dry period in the state of Bahia. According to the president of the federation, Humberto Miranda, in an interview with Portal A AFTERNOONthe projection was an estimated loss of R$600 million per year due to climate change.
“This will have a negative impact on the state’s GDP and consequently on the GDP of the agricultural sector, which has helped Bahia a lot in recent years”, projects Humberto Miranda.
Ana Georgina also attributes the increase in food prices to variations in the international market, especially when it comes to commodities – primary materials of agricultural origin that are sold on a large scale and used in industrial production.
“The behavior of prices on the international market, as Brazil is an extremely important country in the agribusiness relationship, so if you have attractive prices there is a tendency for producers to prefer to sell abroad rather than sell within the country. He ends up selling in dollars, and this is good for him because of the exchange rate. On the other hand, there are products that we need to bring from abroad, like wheat. These products are subject to price fluctuations”, continues the expert.
Impact on the pocket
Due to the excessive increase in the cost of the basic food basket, consumers often choose not to buy the product or even try to replace it with cheaper ones. Despite being the reality of many Brazilians, the strategy of not taking or substituting food to avoid the high prices of essential items in the basic food basket is a concern for Ana Georgina, since as the name suggests, they are basic foods in the diet. .
“There is very little room for maneuver to deal with this because we are talking about basic products. We’re talking about beans, rice, flour, we’re not talking about things that we can easily replace. So at this moment, basically, the strategy used by most families is substitution, either with another product or with a cheaper brand, but none of these actions are lasting because if you have a recurring raise and a salary that doesn’t keep up, you end up in trouble. such as food insecurity”, explains the specialist.
Dieese also studies the behavior of the minimum wage to price increases to understand how purchasing power is and what real values are needed for workers to meet their basic needs.
When prices rise, and the value of the minimum wage does not keep up, access to basic products for the population’s survival becomes more distant. In the same way that the reduction in the cost of the basket improves the purchasing power of workers. “At times when the basket costs less, purchasing power is better. On the other hand, when you have high prices, you have a loss of purchasing power”, concludes economist Ana Georgina.
The expert then warns that it is necessary to think about policies and actions to guarantee one of the most important basic principles: nutrition. “We know that 54% of Bahian workers are informal, so they won’t necessarily have a minimum wage and many others don’t even have work. We need to think about all of this, they are not such simple solutions since food is one of the most basic principles”.
