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PRICE CHECKS: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (centre) talking with a customer while conducting an inspection at a Beijing market on Saturday. -- XINHUA
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BEIJING - CAFE owner Grace Chu is already putting smaller cubes of pork in her stews and burgers.
But with the price of pork continuing to climb - after almost doubling at her local market since April - the 43-year-old is now considering blacking out one-third of her menu.
Across China, a price hike in local diet essentials like pork, eggs, vegetables, cooking oil and instant noodles in recent weeks is vexing food retailers like Madam Chu.
Low-income families, however, are the hardest hit.
'Everything just seems more expensive,' said Mr Chen Sheng, 27, who makes 600 yuan (S$120) a month selling cut honeydew melon on the street in east Beijing.
A meal of rice with stirfried pork and vegetables cost him 9 yuan a few months ago, but now sets him back by 15 yuan.
With a major Chinese Communist Party meeting coming up, Beijing is particularly sensitive to such complaints among the lower income groups and is concerned that the price hikes could help spark social unrest if left unchecked.
On the economic front, the rise in food prices further complicates the government's attempt to boost domestic consumption and rely less on exports for economic growth.
But with costlier food driving China's consumer price index to a 33-month high of 4.4 per cent in June, the lower income groups are likely to defer non-essential purchases in the short-term.
The rising inflationary pressure is unlikely to ease soon, with economic predictions last week estimating that July's figure will hit 5 per cent.
That is well above the Chinese central bank's alarm level of 3 per cent for that key indicator of inflation.
The hike may not have bitten the white-collar classes. 'It's okay, just eat less meat, more vegetables,' as Shandong housewife Wang Rui, 30, put it.
But it has hit the pockets of China's large blue-collar population and rural poor.
In this land of bao and pork ribs, even Beijing butcher Yu Xiaobo, 25, is eating less of the meat he sells.
'I don't blame my customers for buying less. Even I can't bear to eat pork now! And I have to stay open for longer to sell out,' he said.
Meanwhile, Beijing has moved fast to address public concerns.
State TV news bulletins at the weekend showed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao making the rounds at a Beijing market, pledging that the government would stabilise food prices and check on unfair increases.
At the heart of the food price rise - in China and elsewhere - is the spike in global grain prices since last year, in part due to the intensive use of corn for the booming global biofuel business.
In China, economists note, costlier corn-based pig feed coincided with plummeting pork prices last year and outbreaks of the 'blue ear' epidemic on pig farms, all of which made many Chinese pig farmers slaughter their stocks to stem losses.
Experts are debating how this food price hike will pan out and if it - along with soaring property prices, a red-hot stock market and 11.5 per cent GDP growth - is a warning sign of an overheating economy.
But they agree that Beijing must keep its eye on the social stability barometer.
Since the Great Leap Forward famine which killed at least 30 million Chinese in the late 1950s, putting food on the table has remained a basic task for Beijing.
And it would know that in politics, perception rules.
simcy@sph.com.sg
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