Consumer prices rose 4.8% in Turkey in February, bringing annual inflation to a two-decade high of 54.4%, official data showed March 3, as the economic fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens to worsen the country’s inflation woes. 

The gap between consumer and producer inflations grew to more than 50 percentage points in February, as producer prices rose 7.2% on a monthly basis and 105% over a year. 

The uptick in prices, fueled mainly by the slump of the Turkish lira last year, has plunged Turkey back into the grips of a sticky inflation that threatens to reach an annual of 60%-70%, a level unseen in the past 20 years. Consumer inflation hit 36% in 2021 and monthly price increases were in the double digits in December and January, totaling 26%.

Standing out in the February data is the continued surge in the prices of food, to which the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK) assigns the largest weight of 25% in the inflation basket. Faced with simmering popular discontent ahead of elections next year, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government reduced the 8% value added tax on basic foods to 1% last month. Still, food prices soared 8.4%, marked by a 31% increase in vegetable prices that brought annual vegetable inflation to more than 100%. Annual food inflation hit 64.4% — a burden that Turkey’s low- and low-middle-income groups could hardly tolerate.