April 2024: Palaw costs decline by 18%.
Prices of rice continue to decline.
April 2024 witnessed a substantial decline in the cost of preparing palaw in Ashgabat, with the average expense dropping to 61.5 Turkmen manat, marking a 18.0% reduction compared to April 2023’s figure of 75.0 manat. This price also represented a minor decrease of 5.8% from March 2024’s cost of 65.3 manat. Globally, food prices, as reported by the FAO’s Food Price Index, experienced a noteworthy average decline of 7.4% in April 2024 compared to the previous year.
Turkmenistan observed a general trend of price reductions across all products in April 2024 per year-on-year data, except for carrots. Carrot prices were up by 2.8% on a YoY basis. Onion prices saw a large drop, plummeting by 64.8%. This was followed by significant reductions in rice (-22.2%), sunflower oil prices (-20.3%), wheat flour (-16.4%) and beef (-12.5%) as illustrated in Figure 1.
Onion prices experienced a substantial drop of 64.8%, falling from 7.3 manat per kg in April 2023 to 2.6 manat per kg in April 2024. The high prices in the previous year were due to a harsh winter that reduced the onion crop causing prices to spike. By 2024, onion prices had returned to normal levels.
FAO Price Index Changes for Various Product Categories
- The FAO All Rice Price Index decreased by 1.8%, mainly due to lower Indica rice prices driven by harvest pressure.
- The FAO Cereal Price Index, which includes wheat and other grains, dropped by 18.3% year-over-year in April 2024.
- The FAO Vegetable Oil Price Index saw a slight increase of 0.7% in April 2024.
- The FAO Meat Price Index dropped by 0.4% in the same period.
Correlation between palaw prices and the black-market rate
In recent years (2020-2022), Palaw Index price changes closely followed the USD/manat black market exchange rate. However, this correlation seemed to weaken due to a stable exchange rate around 19 manat/USD since 2022. The biggest driver of changes in palaw prices in 2023 were external factors such as increased supply of sunflower oil and wheat flour in the global market.
Methodology
Prices of ingredients in the Palaw Index are collected for 1 kg of onion, carrot, beef, rice, and flour, and 1 liter of cooking oil. Based on the methodology, in order to cook palaw for a family of four, we use 0.3 liters of cooking oil, 0.5 kg of onion, 1 kg of carrots, 0.6 kg of beef, 1 kg of rice, and 0.5 kg of flour in our formula. Please click here to learn more about the methodology of the Palaw Index.
Progres team strives to make Palaw Index reports as inclusive as possible by tracking the price changes of palaw in all major cities of Turkmenistan. Therefore, we kindly ask you to help us in collecting the prices by filling this out the form.
