Price of rice and curry hits two-year-high for average family

By Sanath Nanayakkare

The cost of a meal consisting of rice, vegetables and meat or fish, consumed at an average Sri Lankan household, hit a two-year high in November 2021, a food price tracker for Sri Lanka has shown.

Advocata’s ‘Bath Curry Indicator (BCI), a simple tool that tracks the prices of common food items that go into a rice and curry dish in Sri Lanka, shows that the cost of a meal increased by 13.5% from October to November 2021.

“Since 2019, retail prices have increased by 44%. This means that an average family, which spends Rs. 960 weekly on the BCI basket of food items in November 2019, now has to pay Rs 1,390 for the same basket of goods just two years later,” the researcher said.

“The food items whose prices increased the most in the past month alone were tomatoes (206%), beans (33%) and green chilli (23%),” the Advocata study has revealed.

The BCI tracks the weekly retail prices in the Colombo market of the most commonly consumed food ingredients that might be used in a typical rice and curry meal. Information about the prices are collected from the ‘Weekly Indicators’ that the Central Bank publishes.

Central Bank Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal said on Saturday that there had been an uptick in inflation and it would taper off as supply side disruptions and global commodity prices eased in the coming months.

SJB MP Harsha de Silva said on Monday that there was a correlation between inflation and the money supply. The government followed the Modern Monetary Theory and printed money at such a rate that it devalued the currency and spiked inflation.