According to the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation, the slowdown in the growth of prices for fruit and vegetable in Russia can be seen. Expects say that this trend will continue in the next months. According to the weekly data, the average daily price growth slowed to 0.18% in the first week of June from 0.25% in early May.
At the same time, overall inflation in May remained at the level of 4.1% in annual terms, which is slightly higher than the estimates made by the Ministry of Economic Development of Russia a month earlier. The main reason for this deviation was the dynamics of prices for fruit and vegetable products as the price increase accelerated from minus 3.1% in April to 2% in May, due to the atypically cold weather in April-May and a delay of the early harvest.
The prices for potatoes and other staple vegetables excluding cucumbers and tomatoes grew by 30.7% and 21.6%, respectively, due to the low stocks of production and low volumes of early harvest because of the cold spring.
The prices for greenhouse vegetable (cucumbers and tomatoes), on the contrary, decreased significantly – by 18%, (the previous month they grew by 1.6%). However, this could not fully compensate for rising prices for other vegetables.