Escalating food prices in Bangladesh
![](https://www.fredhyde.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/a-special-kind-of-chicken-coop-smaller-1024x1024.jpg)
Spare a thought for Bangladesh where on top of yesterday’s order for everyone (the whole country) to wear a mask in public, prices for food are creeping up. We are keeping a close watch on the ‘shopping trolley’ of those in the region where we run our schools in particular. It’s a rural region—almost everything is locally grown or fished. The prices (if you simply do a conversion to the Australian dollar for example) look pretty good—a kilo of rice for less than a dollar, and who wouldn’t want a dozen locally grown eggs for just over a $2? However, dig deeper and the figures are much more worrying. If you look at costs as a proportion of a monthly adult wage, a kilo of lentils represents around 2% of the WHOLE MONTH’s paypacket…and translated into Australian wages for the average worker (I’m valuing the ‘average’ worker at $1000 a week by the way), a litre of soybean oil would come to $60. A dozen eggs would also cost you $60…..That would be hard to swallow…