Flour to see another steep increase in prices

Apr 02, 2022 News

Kaieteur News – With the cost of wheat increasing, the Caribbean Millers’ Association (CMA) has pointed to the increases in prices for flour across the region. It said drought in the US and Canada and the impacts from the Russia-Ukraine war have seen prices climb more steeply.

The price for flour which went up by 15 percent last month, is set to see another increase

The CMA has explained that, “With Russian and Ukrainian wheat accounting for close to 30 percent of the worlds exported wheat, this has affected not only the price of the commodity but also the logistics and transportation. These factors mentioned above have led to imminent or actual price increases in the cost of producing flour due to increases greater than 40 percent in the cost of raw materials.
This coupled with increases in cost of fuel and overall operating costs, is unsustainable by any manufacturing entity and therefore must be ultimately passed on in some measure to the customer.” Given this state of affairs, flour will most likely see another steep increase in prices.
In Guyana, the National Milling Company (NAMILCO) which was forced to announce a 15 percent increase in its products last month, is gearing up to raise the price again. The price hike caused the price of the commodity increase to jump from $280 per pack of self-rising flouring to as much as $400 and $460
The company in the daily newspapers said, “Manufacturing companies worldwide are experiencing unprecedented increases in the costs of raw materials, freight, packaging materials, energy, and other inputs…the price of wheat today is 40 percent higher than it was on February 15, 2022 just three weeks ago. During this period, we have also seen increases in the cost of packaging, additives, and just recently, fuel.”
As a consequence, NAMILCO said it can no longer sustain its operations at the current price for flour. In this regard, the milling company said it must increase its prices by 15 percent with immediate effect, to ensure the continued supply of the important commodities.
“We will work at leveraging economies of scale available to us (through wheat vessel ownership) to mitigate some of the adverse impacts of freight logistics, market access and raw material supply,” the company assured.
It said too that last year when Guyana was impacted by rising costs, NAMILCO absorbed these escalations and avoided passing the costs to its customers, however no other option is left in this specific circumstance.

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