 and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).){kind=link}
Food prices in Turkey have risen nearly 733 percent since September 2021 while global food prices increased only 1.2 percent over the same period, according to an index prepared by economist İnan Mutlu using data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The comparison, reported by the Karar daily after Mutlu shared an animated chart on the social media platform X, uses September 2021 as a baseline of 100 for both Turkey and the world. By April 2026, the global food price index had reached 101.2, while Turkey’s index had climbed to 832.9.
Global food prices were therefore almost unchanged over the roughly four-and-a-half-year period, while food prices in Turkey rose more than eightfold. The chart shows the global line moving within a relatively narrow band, while the Turkish line rises steeply, with sharper increases during parts of 2023 and 2024, and again in late 2025 and early 2026.
Mutlu said the data showed Turkey’s food inflation could not be explained mainly by global shocks.
“The issue is not a ‘global crisis,’” he wrote on X, blaming “the collapse of the Turkish lira, the erosion of Turkey’s agricultural production capacity and an economic model that makes high inflation permanent.”
The FAO said its Food Price Index, which tracks monthly changes in international prices of a basket of globally traded food commodities, averaged 130.7 points in April 2026. That was up 1.6 percent from March and 2 percent from a year earlier, but still below the peak reached after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
TurkStat said food and non-alcoholic beverage prices in Turkey rose 34.55 percent year-on-year in April 2026, above the headline annual inflation rate of 32.37 percent. Food prices also rose 3.70 percent from the previous month, according to TurkStat.
Food prices have an outsized effect on household purchasing power because food and non-alcoholic beverages are among the main expenditure groups in Turkey’s consumer price index, along with transportation and housing-related costs.
Ramazan Başak, a former deputy chair of Turkey’s Financial Crimes Investigation Board (MASAK), also commented on Mutlu’s chart, saying the widening gap after 2021 was not accidental, the Karar daily reported.
Başak said the gap reflected the government’s low-interest-rate policy at the time, Turkey’s return to the Financial Action Task Force gray list and weakening rule-of-law standards.
“This was not done to us by foreign powers,” Başak wrote, according to the daily.
The comparison does not mean global food markets were calm throughout the period. Pandemic disruptions, Russia’s war in Ukraine, climate shocks and higher energy prices all affected international commodity prices, but those shocks did not produce a sustained increase comparable to Turkey’s domestic food price surge, which by April 2026 had pushed Mutlu’s index more than eight times above its September 2021 level.