Chinese consumers grapple with ‘flying pigs and rocketing eggs’ as supply disruptions send food inflation soaring
- China’s consumer inflation accelerated by 2.7 per cent last month from 2.5 per cent in June, due mainly to rising food prices
- Supply-side problems have sent pork and egg prices surging this year, with many Chinese consumers starting to feel the pinch
When it comes to buying food for daily meals, Chinese consumers are increasingly being forced to swallow unaffordable prices for two staple products – so-called flying pigs and rocketing eggs.
Supply-side problems have sent the price of pork surging this year and driven up egg prices in the past month, with the price trends becoming a fixture of local media reporting in the process.
Last month, pork prices rose by 85.7 per cent on-year and expanded 10.3 per cent from June, new data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed. The price of pork has more than doubled in the first seven months of the year from the same period in 2019.
The price of pork, a staple meat in China, has the largest weighting in China’s consumer price index (CPI) and last year it contributed about 30 per cent of the country’s headline inflation rate of 2.9 per cent.