Top 100 Countries by Food Inflation (%), 2025 — Full Ranking + Context
Food Inflation by Country: 2025 Snapshot
Food inflation is the year-over-year change in the CPI food index, usually reported as “Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages” in national consumer price statistics. It matters because food takes a larger share of household budgets than many discretionary goods, so a jump in grocery prices can reduce real purchasing power before headline inflation fully reflects the strain. This ranking uses the latest available 2025 food CPI snapshot to compare the intensity of food price pressure across 100 countries.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!What the ranking captures
- Metric: year-over-year change in the food CPI sub-index, shown in percent.
- Period: latest available 2025 monthly observation where comparable food CPI data are available, rounded to one decimal point.
- Interpretation: high food inflation may reflect currency depreciation, import costs, domestic supply shocks, subsidy changes, conflict disruption or broad macro inflation.
- Comparability: CPI basket weights, product coverage and collection methods differ by country, so the ranking is best read as a pressure indicator, not a perfect measure of identical grocery baskets.
Key drivers behind food-price pressure
- Energy pass-through: fertilizer, refrigeration and transport costs can feed into retail food prices with a lag.
- FX depreciation: weaker currencies quickly reprice imported staples, fuel and agricultural inputs.
- Weather risks: droughts and floods can lift fresh-food prices even when international commodity markets are calmer.
- Policy shifts: subsidy reform, VAT changes, administered prices, export bans and price caps can move the CPI food index abruptly.
- Supply chains: port delays, freight volatility and conflict-related logistics can widen the gap between farm-gate and retail prices.
Top 20 countries with the highest food inflation in 2025
The upper end of the ranking reflects inflation pressure, not simply expensive grocery markets. In the highest-ranked countries, several stress channels often overlap: exchange-rate pressure, domestic supply disruption, energy pass-through and policy resets. These cases should be read as inflation-stress outliers rather than normal grocery-price comparisons.
| Rank | Country | Food inflation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Venezuela | 220.4% |
| 2 | Zimbabwe | 94.8% |
| 3 | Argentina | 73.2% |
| 4 | Turkey | 46.7% |
| 5 | Nigeria | 33.5% |
| 6 | Ethiopia | 29.1% |
| 7 | Pakistan | 27.4% |
| 8 | Egypt | 26.9% |
| 9 | Ghana | 25.6% |
| 10 | Lebanon | 24.7% |
| 11 | Iran | 23.9% |
| 12 | Angola | 22.8% |
| 13 | Sierra Leone | 21.9% |
| 14 | Sudan | 21.5% |
| 15 | Russia | 20.8% |
| 16 | Ukraine | 19.6% |
| 17 | Kazakhstan | 18.4% |
| 18 | Sri Lanka | 17.9% |
| 19 | Tunisia | 17.4% |
| 20 | Kenya | 16.8% |
Top 20 food inflation rates
Horizontal bars show the year-over-year change in the food CPI index. The scale is compressed by extreme outliers, so mid-table differences should be read carefully.
How to read: a high rate does not automatically mean food scarcity. It may reflect a pricing-channel problem such as currency depreciation, a policy reset such as subsidy removal, or a physical shock such as drought, conflict or logistics disruption. For country analysis, pair this ranking with exchange rates, energy prices and the import share of staple foods.
