El Salvador: clamorous protest over food prices

Some 400 protesters beat on pots and pans and blew whistles outside the Central Reserve Bank of El Salvador to protest the rise in prices of staple food items.

"I’m desperate, we can't take any more," Guadalupe López, who is raising four children on her own, told IPS. "Besides, we don't have jobs that pay us enough to support our children, to feed them and pay for their education."

Francisco Marroquín, 26, said the government should establish price controls and raise the minimum wage, "so that people can survive." Participants in Wednesday’s pots and pans protest distributed leaflets demanding government action to guarantee "food sovereignty and security."

A demonstration of this kind has not been seen in the Salvadoran capital since the 1980s, when rightwing women’s groups protested against the Christian Democratic government of then president Napoleón Duarte (1984-1989).

El Salvador’s Consumer Defence Centre (CDC) said that between January 2007 and January 2008, the retail price of beans has risen 68 percent, in addition to price increases for rice (56.2 percent) and maize (37.5 percent) -- all basic staples in the diets of poor Salvadoran households.

In the last few years, international market prices for commodities like these have risen steadily. In December 2007, the food price index published by the British magazine The Economist reached its highest point since it was first calculated in 1845.

In nearly every country in Latin America, prices of many foodstuffs have risen by much more than the average increase in the consumer price index.

The rising trend in prices is not a result of scarcity. World food production is rising, but not fast enough to cushion the effect of increased demand, which has two main causes: the boom in biofuels, and increased food purchases by China and India, as a result of better living conditions for the people in those countries, according to experts.

In El Salvador, the CDC study shows that wage increases have not kept up with price hikes.

In May 2004, the cost of the basic food basket in urban areas stood at 128.19 dollars a month, while the minimum wage was 151.25 dollars a month. But in January 2008, the food basket cost 159.90 dollars and the minimum wage was 162 dollars.

According to Armando Flores, the head of CDC, "this is the result of a market that isn’t working for the people, and it’s due to the lack of political will to implement public policies to alleviate the situation." He called on the government to regulate food prices.

"Food prices are increasing by leaps and bounds, like a hare, and wages, like a tortoise, are being left behind," he said.

Economy Minister Yolanda de Gavidia has repeatedly declared that the high food prices are due to the high price of oil, and that there is not much that can be done to halt the spiral, since El Salvador is not an oil producing country.

The government announced that inflation stood at five percent in 2007, but private analysts and social activists cast doubts on this figure.

Carlos Acevedo, an economist with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), said that "the price increases for items in the basic basket are substantially greater" than the official statistics indicate.

In his view, the government should confront the problem "by importing products that have experienced considerable price increases," and raising incomes by means of policies involving private enterprise in the creation of "more jobs with decent salaries."

Analysts estimate that remittances from the 2.9 million Salvadorans who live abroad, mainly in the United States, are the main fac