The FINANCIAL — For the first time in more than two years, meat prices are displaying a steady increase; month-to-month changes in prices have been positive for the last four months.
These changes bounced back, slowly bringing meat prices to their earlier values, and in January 2017 year-to-year changes also become positive. Furthermore, in March 2017, the year-to-year increase in meat prices reached +7.11%, while the change compared-to-base period was +6.97%. It is interesting that month-to-month changes in meat prices had been decidedly modest in recent years (within a 1% margin), while in February and March of 2017 similar changes exceeded 2%.
The main cause of the increase in meat prices is the boosting of exports of meat and livestock from Georgia. According to GeoStat’s preliminary data, the export of live bovine animals for the first three months of 2017 exceeded 9.8 mln USD, while the corresponding figure for the same period of 2016 equalled just 3.8 mln USD. The increase in the export of sheep meat from the country is also dramatic; these increased 40-fold (from 57,000 to 2.27 mln USD) in the first three months of 2017 compared to the same period of last year.
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