The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reported that global food prices dropped by 2.1% in 2024 compared to the previous year. However, prices are still much higher than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to AFP.
The FAO’s Food Price Index, which tracks global food prices, averaged 122.0 points in 2024. This was 2.6 points lower than the average in 2023. Even though prices fell over the year, they actually went up month by month in 2024, starting at 117.6 points in January and reaching 127.0 points in December. This increase was mainly due to higher prices for meat, dairy, and vegetable oils.
Now, the FAO maintains monthly and global tracking changes in widely traded food commodity prices. Prices fell a little in 2024 but today are about 26% over the prices of five years ago.
Food prices have fallen for the most part due to trade disruptions associated with COVID-19 but have risen amid the recovering economy due to increasingly high levels of inflation. Record-high spikes of wheat prices hit in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but wheat shipments then stabilized. Subsequently, prices started falling in early 2024.
According to FAO, the overall fall is related to the massive fall in the price of cereals and sugar forecast in 2024. Cereal prices were 13.3% lower than that in 2023, while the sugar price index decreased by 13.2%.
