After two weeks of relative calm,
the prices of food and beverages rebounded strongly between April 1 and 7
.
A survey by the consulting firm Eco Go indicates that these highly sensitive categories of household consumption
increased by an average of 2%.
On the other hand, LCG, which measures exclusively in large supermarkets, the values
shot up 2.5% in the period
.
"The first week of April was bad," says Guido Lorenzo, director of LCG bluntly.
The bad data anticipates, according to this specialist,
"another month with high inflation."
He alludes to the fact that this Friday, INDEC will announce inflation for March, which private consultants forecast at around 7%, with food above average.
The CPI for Capital for March climbed 7.1%
, which for many analysts is a preview of the data that will be released on March 14.
Eco Go identified that
the products that led the increases
in the first days of April were citrus fruits (8.3%), sugar and sweeteners (5.7%), fresh pasta (4.9%), canned tomatoes (4 .5%), fresh and frozen hake and fresh bovine offal and offal (4.3%).
Strictly speaking,
most of the categories (21 out of 30) registered increases above the average.
"Easter and long holidays through, the month began difficult in terms of inflation," says the report by Eco Go, the consultancy led by the economist Marina Dal Pogetto.
For this reason, Eco Go
projects inflation for food and beverages of 7% for April and 6.5% for the general index
.
Both Eco Go and LCG collect between 6,000 and 8,000 basic consumer products in large hypermarkets and supermarkets.
In other words,
in the commercial formats where the Fair Prices program is concentrated
, which establishes a maximum increase of 3.2% per month for some 50,000 items.
The jump in food surprised analysts.
It happens that both consultants
had registered a general slowdown in the last 15 days,
but the trend has just broken.
"In the first days of April, the rise averaged almost 2.5%, accelerating 0.7 percentage points compared to the previous week," says the LCG survey.
Menescaldi, from Eco Go, points out that the record for the first week of April (2%) "
is the highest since the third week of February
."
Vegetables (7.9%), takeaway meals (3.2%), meats and oils (2.6%) and bakery products, cereals and pasta (2%), led the weekly rise in the LCG study, which highlights another important element.
"What is most striking and worrying is that
half of the basket that we surveyed had an increase in the week
," says Lorenzo and adds: "Core inflation (that is, the one that does not compute seasonal increases) can hardly fall from a value of 6.5% monthly average".
The prices of the basket of food and beverages "is sensitive data because it directly impacts socioeconomic indicators," explains the director of LCG, since "if income cannot match this rate of increase, poverty
and destitution
."
Poverty, precisely,
covered 39.2% of the population in the second semester of 2022
, according to the latest data released by INDEC.
Eco Go estimates inflation around 6.5% for April, "driven by increases in prepaid (2.36% for all users), private schools (3.35%), domestic service (14%), trains and buses (6.6% indexed to February inflation) and electricity rates (31.1% on average), among others, "which would show an expected slowdown compared to March which, according to our projections, would have been of 7.2%", emphasizes Menescaldi.
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For formal workers, inflation in March was 7.5%
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