Food Price Spikes

These alerts are a result of a statistical process that compares current prices to seasonal trends in prices. It does not account explicitly for other factors in the general economy, such as general price inflation rates, that may impact how seriously fluctuations in key staple food prices affect local buying power and food security. The linear regression used to calculate the seasonal trends and variability in prices assumes that the time series of prices is stationary for each market, i.e., that the nature of the trend doesn't vary over time for each market. The general economic forces affecting prices, such as population growth and inflation, are implicitly represented by the coefficient of the trend term in the linear regression. Under the assumption of stationarity, these forces are assumed to be constant for each market, but this may not be realistic.

When using and interpreting ALPS dataset in the context of market and food security analysis, it is important to note that the indicator is more meaningful when used for the most consumed food commodities in the country. Locally produced staples food commodities should also get priority attention, and finally analysts can also consider imported commodities.