Monday, May 5, 2025, 01:06
The price of the purchase basket has shot in Spain and consumers are forced to be increasingly exhausite with what they add in it. The rise in costs forces to put aside specific whims to focus on the basic products that we need yes or yes in our pantry, to try to save something at the end of the month and be able to face an inflation that also reaches the price of light, gasoline or butane.
In this regard, the Bank of Spain has warned of the possibility that food prices are kept elevated in the medium term, a forecast that is based on the factors exposed by international institutions, which pass through geopolitical tensions and commercial policies.
In this context of political uncertainty, the prices of food raw materials have experienced intense growth due to various disturbances that have affected the agricultural offer, as can be seen from the report published on Wednesday by the Bank of Spain ‘Evolution and perspectives of food prices’.
Among them are the increase in energy costs, extreme meteorological phenomena related to climate change and the implementation of restrictive commercial policies on the export of certain products in some countries, which has increased prices worldwide.
Under this premise, the Bank of Spain recalled that in recent years “the increase in food prices has shown a remarkable persistence and has been, in general, superior to that observed in the rest of the goods that make up the shopping cart.”
Given this, several factors, exposed by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Bank, support the possibility that food prices are maintained high in the medium term. Among them, climatic factors, geopolitical tensions and commercial policies, which could alter global supply and demand, affecting food security.
Thus, the Bank of Spain stressed that the relative prices of food have grown in Spain to a greater extent than in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMA), specifically, 19% compared to 13% in accumulated terms for the period between 2019 and 2024.
This difference observed in the evolution of the relative prices of food is explained by the different composition of the consumption basket, since some of the foods that have more expensive, such as olive oil, have a greater weight in Spain. For example, olive oil prices grew, between 2019 and 2024, 139% in Spain and 102% in the EMA, but in the Spanish consumption basket this food weighs triple (0.6% compared to 0.2%) than in that of the EUM.
