Retail Food Prices Around the World: Systematic Assessment of Data From National Governments and International Agencies

Abstract

Policies and programs to improve global nutrition increasingly aim to improve overall diet quality through systemic change in the food environment, often focusing on the availability and price of diverse food items. Almost all of the world’s governments conduct nationally representative surveys of retail establishments every month and publish a consumer price index (CPI) to guide economic policy, but use of these data to improve food markets and nutrition has been limited. This study describes all of the publicly available monthly CPI data by food group, region and income level for every country of the world in 2019 and 2020. A total of 170 governments currently report their overall food CPI, of which 58 also report more disaggregated indexes for different types of foods, and 49 report price levels for at least some individual food items. To address gaps in coverage we compared these CPI data with prices from international agencies’ Early Warning Systems (EWS) designed to help target agricultural assistance and food aid, which covered a total of 78 countries in 2019 and 2020. The EWS data include many lower-income countries that do not post their CPI data publicly, but generally report fewer items and more often omit the diverse, perishable foods that would be needed to improve nutrition and health. To monitor food systems it will be necessary for national governments and international agencies to pursue more transparent and standardized price and index reporting, improve data collection of diverse foods and food groups, and to make food price data more timely and accessible.