In August the consumer price index was 100.4%; since the beginning of the year it has been 109.8%, according to Rosstat. In the last summer month, prices for fruits and vegetables decreased. At the same time, prices for food in fast-food outlets increased by 0.8%.
The price for an average minimum package of food products in Russia was 3583.9 rubles a month in late August. In Moscow it was 4269.4 rubles, in St. Petersburg – 4323.9 rubles.
Meanwhile, according to Sergey Hestanov, Associate Professor of the stock markets and financial engineering department of the Faculty of Finance and Banking of RANEPA, about 30% of the consumer basket is imported, this is the official estimate; for the residents of the western part of Russia, it is probably even closer to 40%. As soon as there is a growth of the dollar, a round of inflation immediately begins.
According to Hestanov, such a situation does not occur in all countries. “When the euro weakened against the dollar from 1.6 to 1.18, and it is roughly almost by half, the inflation there was around 2% a year, it remained at about 2%. Such a miracle happened because their structure of exports and imports is different from ours. We almost exclusively export raw materials and products of primary processing, with a little addition of military equipment, and vice versa, we consume consumer goods. In the European Union the structure of exports and imports is roughly symmetrical. And so the euro rate fluctuates strongly, but no one notices this.”
Such a situation, where the devaluation of the ruble is followed by inflation, will continue indefinitely. “In the history of the economy there is an example of the Dutch syndrome. In order to overcome such a structure of the economy, it took about 12-15 years for them. Given the fact that our process is just beginning, in the next few years here this dependence of the rate of the ruble and consumer prices will continue,” the expert predicts.
According to him, nearly all sectors in our food market are affected. “We are well supplied with fodder grain. It is, perhaps, the only object of our exports, and we are well represented on the international arena. But on many other positions it is the other way around, we are importing food. When the food embargo was introduced, on the one hand, it caused the enthusiasm of many agricultural producers, as it eliminated competition, but it had quite a dramatic effect on consumers.”
Hestanov says that Russia does not have much imported foodstuffs on its market: “When many people say that parmesan is gone, we never had that much parmesan, not in money, not in tons. But the very presence of Western producers led to the fact that domestic producers could not raise their prices higher than western producers did. This small presence of import foodstuffs, was like a natural limiter. That is, during an attempt to raise prices higher, people began to buy more imports. Now this limiter is removed, and many purely domestic products, where the share of imported components is negligible, became more expensive almost together with the dollar. Taking into account that the production cycle in most agricultural industries is rather long, the dependence of food prices on the national currency and, as a result, on the price of oil, will continue for at least 3-5 years."
