Cost of living | Light at the end of the tunnel on food prices

JOHANNESBURG - Rolling blackouts seem to be the main contributor to high food prices.

READ: UK inflation eases but holds above 10%: data

The National Agricultural Marketing Council says South Africa is better off than many other countries and we should see a decrease in food prices in the second half of this year.

Thabile Nkunjana from the National Agricultural Marketing Council said, "if you put or look into the numbers of processed products, the issue with that is load shedding. And if you look specifically on products that have been pushing food prices in March, it was vegetables and fruits and then bread and cereal which is similar to other countries."

"With vegetables, if you go to Rwanda, fresh produced have gone up by close to 50-percent compared to South Africa which was 20-percent. And when you go to countries like Egypt, the same thing has been observed and UK inflation has increased by over 30-percent and the numbers that they are seeing they were last seen in the 1980s, so it differs from country to country."

"But going into the second half of the year, these things should be at least going a bit down particularly the vegetable products as we've seen from the data released in March for the fresh produce markets and numbers there are looking much better compared to what we were seeing in January and February."