OPINION: Basic food prices: real stats, real-life truths, real pain

Last Updated on Saturday, 5 July 2025, 23:41 by Writer

By GHK Lall

The caption screamed the pain of poor Guyanese: “Basic food items up 75% in the last four years” (Demerara Waves, July 4, 2025). For those longing for some statistics pulled from real-life, the ones from the New Guyana Marketing Corporation (NGMC), stand on their own feet, speak for themselves. For one reason only. They present the struggles, and the pain, of the poor in Guyana. The only p word (capital P) that is highlighted today is price. Food prices, basic ones. The only G word employed isn’t related to national management, but Guyanese.

How do they manage? How, when basic food items, such as greens and ground provisions, have gone up so steeply in the last four years? The grim picture and specter have been shared weekly for scores of weeks with religious regularity by Stabroek News via its “Cost-of-Living” series. As a forerunner to the Demerara Waves article, residents from many communities across Guyana have bewailed the price of rice, oil, and cooking gas, among similar such essentials. Pak choy and rice, oil and eddo, and flour and chicken, are not the stuff of gourmets. They are the poor man’s and distressed woman’s bread and butter items. I took a rare foray into the Bourda Market and a cucumber is $150 (not $80), and Pak choy starts from $200 a bundle. Perhaps, because I am a stranger and tenderfoot, I got slammed.

The NGMC is not a private enterprise entity, nor a private citizen contributing in the public space. Hence, it should be speaking to truth and reality, as opposed to those who have been doubted when they question and decry official statistics. Speaking to a very senior man in the private sector recently on a pricing issue, he brought up how is it that official stats can represent inflation at a gorgeous 2.5% level? I acknowledge that it was not food inflation per se, and here it is that there is this starkly revealing portrait of basic food prices up 75%, but nothing that comes close to double digits has ever seen the light of day from the national experts. Those who make a rich living pronouncing on prices. I committed to not using the word beginning with a capital G, so I use official, which should be enough.

Focusing on inflation, and the NGMC records, it is common knowledge that averages are employed. All things being equal, the use of that convention means that some basic food items stay the same, some fall slightly, and some spike and soar, and from which an average is derived. How an inflation rate of 2.5% was arrived at in the last four years is a mystery to me, and must be a torture for the Guyanese food shopper. I invite anyone to select their basket of basic food items, one common to almost all ordinary citizens, and separate that from general inflation, and see how well they do. Official stats are not just denounceable, they are deplored as some sort of con game played on the Guyanese people, the weak and vulnerable ones. A little less sharply, those who manufacture those stats come across as deceivers of a very callous kind.

Aside from the numbers (maybe alongside them might be wiser), I shiver to think how the minimum wage worker in Guyana manages to exist. At $60,000 monthly in the private sector, and approximately 50% more in the public sector, it is beyond me how they survive in a steeply rising price environment. How do the single parent and the elderly on fixed pensions (perhaps only one) and with no foreign financial stipends to help them get by, cope? What can they buy, and how much? This is not related to nails and zinc sheets, or a new skirt and footwear, as urgently needed as those may be, but of food that must be consumed daily. The range of items that belong in a basic food basket doesn’t change that drastically, if at all. Neither grapes nor foreign mandarin oranges nor salmon are included. Just local items. Essentials ones for a simple meal.

It is a shame that this is how much basic food prices have risen, as have been written all along, but dismissed on each occasion. Ten percent doesn’t cut it, so also does a belated cash grant, or that pension increase. Instead of those in charge twisting their tongues to talk about their twisted numbers, I exhort them to talk to the truths embedded in these food prices. It is a disgrace, a global one I think, that Guyanese celebrated as being among the richest anywhere, and across the board (averages again) cannot buy basic food items, or must be content with fewer of them. All this national wealth, and this is the health of the have-nots in the most internationally cheered country.