Tomatoes push food prices up

Food prices increased 0.7 percent in the March 2008 month, Statistics New Zealand said today.

Theincrease was mainly due to higher prices for the fruit and vegetables subgroup (up 3.1 percent), inparticular tomatoes (up 79.9 percent).

The most significant downward contribution came from lower pricesfor apples (down 24.0 percent) and kumara (down 26.9 percent) .

Other subgroups to increase were grocery food (up 0.4 percent), restaurant meals and ready-to-eatfood (up 0.6 percent), and non-alcoholic beverages (up 1.4 percent).

However meat, poultry andfish decreased slightly (down 0.1 percent), when compared with February 2008.

For the year to March 2008, food prices rose 6.0 percent. All of the five subgroups recorded upwardcontributions, with the most significant upward contribution coming from higher prices for the grocery foodsubgroup (up 9.0 percent).

This was followed by, in order of significance, restaurant meals and ready-to-eatfood (up 4.7 percent), non-alcoholic beverages (up 7.1 percent), meat, poultry and fish (up 2.7 percent) andfruit and vegetables (up 2.9 percent).