Rising Freight Costs Contribute To High Price In Food Items: A-G

The rising cost of food prices and import of items has been a reoccurring issue raised by the public and this is due to the increase in freight costs.

Attorney-General and Minister for Economy Aiyaz Sayed-Khai­yum stated this at the revised 2021-2022 National Budget consultation at the Nadi Civic Centre on March 8.

“I’m sure everyone here will agree that the cost of goods is going up in Fiji, a lot of things, the price is go­ing up, why is it going up."

"Before the Ukraine war, one of the rea­sons why the prices are going up of course was because of the freight cost."

“Freight costs have gone up signif­icantly as I have mentioned earlier on containers that cost $5000 now cost $15,000, anyone who imports knows that and also because of supply chain issues countries were shut down; raw materials were not accessible.”

“You see in Fiji, inflation was negatively placed, things weren’t increasing at all they were going downwards in cost now of course inflation is going up."

"The U.S was seven per cent, the last survey shows so for us it will have an im­pact,” he said.”

He said if tensions increased, there would be more demand for gas from the Middle East

“Places like Qatar, they make a lot of gas, they extract it out of the ground so there’ll be high demand for that, less supply that means the price will go up, we expect that to happen."

"The price of fuel has gone up because of uncertainty in the world,” he said.

He said this was also why the gov­ernment was doing a review of the National Minimum wage.

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