Serbia Food Prices Reach 96.6% of EU Average, Wages Lag
A Fiscal Council study finds food prices in Serbia are closing in on the EU average faster than wages: food costs sit at 96.6% of the EU level, while incomes still fall short of half.
Food and non-alcoholic beverage prices in Serbia have reached 96.6% of the European Union average, according to a new Fiscal Council study titled “Serbian Agriculture Between Stagnation and Reform: Production, Prices and Agricultural Policy.” For comparison, the overall price level for all goods and services in Serbia stood at around 60% of the European average in 2024. In other words, food is catching up to European prices far faster than anything else people buy in the country.
Income is moving at the opposite pace. Average earnings in Serbia don’t even reach half the EU average, and they sit 15 percentage points below Bulgaria’s, even though Bulgaria is the Union’s least developed economy. The Fiscal Council warns that this gap, food prices closing in on Europe faster than wages, carries “additional economic and social weight.”
A Third of the Household Basket Goes to Food
According to Forbes and AgroSmart, the first outlets to report the study’s findings, food and non-alcoholic beverages make up nearly 30% of the average consumer basket in Serbia. The portal 021 puts the same figure at about one third of the basket, a number that differs slightly from the other two sources but doesn’t change the picture much: this is one of the largest single line items in household budgets.
Which Foods Are Priced Above the European Average?
The Fiscal Council compared ten food categories against European prices and found Serbia above the EU average in six of them. Oils and fats show the widest gap, running about 20% higher, followed by sugar, jams and sweets at roughly 15% above average. Milk, processed meat and eggs cost about 8% more than in the EU, and prepared food products are in similar territory.
Vegetables remain below the European level, at 90% of the average, as do cereals, fruit and meat, at around 85%. Even here there’s no standing still: meat prices climbed from 81.5% to 88.5% of the European level between 2022 and 2024.
Farm Gate Prices Jumped to Nearly 96%
Part of the explanation, the Fiscal Council argues, starts right at the beginning of the chain, with producers. Farm gate prices for agricultural products in Serbia stood at 72% of the European average between 2015 and 2017. The turnaround began in 2021, and by 2022 farm gate prices had jumped to almost 96% of the EU average. Over the three years from 2022 to 2024, the average came out at 87%.
The Fiscal Council ties that jump to the global crisis in mineral fertilizers, seeds and crop protection products in 2021 and 2022, but adds that the shock hit Serbian producers harder than the rest of Europe, meaning external factors alone don’t explain the increase. Retail prices reached almost 95% of the European average over the same 2022 to 2024 period, which means the gap between farm gate and shelf prices doesn’t by itself explain why food in Serbia is this expensive.
“Such a high level of food prices points to structural anomalies in the domestic food and agriculture chain,” the study’s authors write, adding that pressure on prices also builds up in processing, distribution and trade, not just in primary production.
Which Countries in the Region Are Cheaper Than Serbia?
Here the sources disagree on the exact numbers. Forbes, citing the study, reports that Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Croatia sit at around 92% of the European food price level. AgroSmart, reporting on the same study, gives different individual figures: Romania at about 76%, Bulgaria at about 89%. Whichever number is used, both sources agree on the conclusion: food in Serbia costs more than in 11 countries of central and eastern Europe, and more than in neighbors that are economically less developed.
Three Reasons the Fiscal Council Points To
The study’s authors list three circumstances that, in theory, should be pushing Serbian food prices lower: the country has reached only half of the EU’s level of development, it has traditionally been a net exporter of agri-food products, and the state has raised agricultural subsidies to around 1% of GDP, a level comparable to the European standard. None of those three factors, they say, explains why the outcome runs the opposite way.
Serbian newspapers have previously reported the Fiscal Council’s figure that agriculture receives 1.4 billion euros a year in subsidies. The new analysis adds a further point: that money, in the Fiscal Council’s assessment, isn’t well targeted, since better-aimed incentives should translate into higher productivity and lower, not higher, raw material prices.
What the Fiscal Council Is Calling For
The recommendations point in the same direction: a multi-year, predictable agricultural policy instead of reactive measures, technological modernization of production, and a system that, modeled on the EU, would transparently track prices across the entire chain, from input purchases through farm gate and food industry output prices to the store shelf. The authors also call for competition protection as a measure, arguing that concentration at certain links of the chain creates price distortions that hurt both farmers and consumers.
