The global inflation picture, which had shown tentative signs of easing in May, is now facing renewed pressure from a familiar culprit: food prices. In Argentina, the consumer price index slowed to 2.1 percent in May, the second consecutive month of deceleration, offering a rare respite for an economy battling triple-digit annual inflation. Yet private surveys from the second week of June reveal that food and beverage prices — the heaviest component of the CPI basket — have accelerated sharply, rising 0.6 percent in supermarkets after two weeks of near-flat readings. The consultancy LCG, which tracks 8,000 products across five major chains, warned that the monthly average inflation for food has climbed to 2 percent, threatening to undo the broader disinflation trend.

This pattern is not confined to Argentina. In Brazil, the May IPCA reading of 0.58 percent was driven largely by food and drink, which contributed nearly half of the monthly increase. Economists there now warn that the El Niño weather phenomenon could become a fresh challenge for the central bank as it weighs the continuation of its interest-rate cutting cycle. The cumulative inflation figure has already breached the official target, and analysts in São Paulo note that climate disruptions to agricultural output could keep food prices elevated for months, complicating the monetary policy outlook.

Viewed from Accra, the narrative takes a different turn. Ghana’s Government Statistician, Dr Alhassan Iddrisu, expressed confidence that inflation would moderate later this year as the main harvest season approaches. Food constitutes a significant portion of Ghana’s CPI basket, and historically, harvests have brought prices down. “We don’t expect things to stay at these high levels forever,” he said on June 16, offering a cautiously optimistic counterpoint to the alarm bells ringing in South America. Yet with food inflation still rising, the harvest effect may prove insufficient if supply-chain disruptions or currency weakness persist.

In Buenos Aires, the May inflation data also triggered an automatic adjustment to the exchange-rate band, with the wholesale dollar’s trading limits set to rise by 2.1 percent in July. The mechanism, designed to anchor expectations in a crawling-peg system, reflects the central bank’s reliance on inflation as a guide for currency policy. But the renewed food-price momentum — led by meat in Argentine supermarkets, according to private surveys — suggests that the disinflation achieved so far remains fragile. The question now is whether the coming harvests in West Africa and the Southern Cone can deliver the relief that monetary authorities in both regions desperately need, or whether climate and structural factors will keep food inflation sticky well into the second half of the year.