A visit to a small local bakery yesterday (Monday) highlighted the plight of the ‘little guy’, with an official notice in the window indicating that the price of bread had gone up. Now this has nothing to do with the national tariff increases on wheat, as yet, but a desperate measure from a smaller bakery to survive the economic crunch.

A fresh, locally-baked 700g loaf of white or brown bread went up from R5 to R6. This is still way below the costs of bread in supermarkets, who charge anything from R9 to R13 for a loaf of bread, but still a singularly large increase in its own right..

With the Treasury Department increasing the import duties of wheat products from R911.20 to R1224.31 per ton, it is expected that the bigger bread producers will pass the increase on to consumers, with the cost of cereal and bread increasing by anything from 90 cents to R1.60.

The bakery in question had absorbed 5 local wheat price hikes in the last year before finally passing the price hike on to consumers.

According to national statistics, the price of a loaf of white bread produced by large national bakeries (700g) increased from R11.88 in November to R11.90 in December 2015. By February, a loaf of white bread was R12.39.

These increases happened when the price of international wheat had been steadily decreasing! So, to blame the tariff increase for the rise in bread prices makes no sense.

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