Bread price to go up

An official of the National Bakers Association of Zimbabwe said bakers planned to raise the price of bread for the second time in four months, ‘The Financial Gazette’ said on Thursday. The last bread price increase was in April this year when the price for a standard loaf rose by up to 15 percent.

“The price of flour is set to increase by 24.7 percent. This will obviously result in further bread price increases in the month of August 2000,” a spokesman for the association was quoted as saying. He said that the price of bread had increased by just 40.8 percent between August last year and this month, compared to Zimbabwe’s annual inflation which was pegged at 59.4 percent during the year to June 2000.

The newspaper said that the latest price hike comes in the wake of a looming bread shortage, blamed on an acute shortage of wheat in the country. Milling industry sources told the newspaper that Zimbabwe could experience flour and bread shortages next month unless it imports wheat stocks to tide the country over until the harvest, due at the end of the year.