Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the question as well. Every evening my daughter checks the prices for me. Yesterday, sunflower oil was R3 400 and something per ton. Wheat is the one that is getting out of hand at, I would say, R3 100 per ton. Interestingly, a few months ago, the maize price rose over R1 900 per ton. Yesterday evening, it was reported as R1 550. At Pick 'n Pay you pay R24,50 for 5kg of maize meal.
What I would ask in answering this question is that you must distinguish between sufficient food being available and the price of the food. Until now, I think the market has been responsible in ensuring that there is sufficient food available in the country for all our people, but there has been a sharp food price increase. We have the quantities of food available even by importing, like wheat, for example. The Free State didn't have any harvest for about two years and it is producing more than both regions of the Western Cape. Wheat is actually the problem at the moment.
The free market was basically responsible, as the Food Price Monitoring Committee has indicated, for a 0,7% decrease in real food prices for the period from June 2003 to July 2006.
What is different from 2002 when maize prices went over R2 000 a ton, is that our social security has dramatically changed, both in the monetary value thereof as well as in the number of beneficiaries. That is why the Minister of Finance has previously indicated that the government was not planning to interfere in food pricing.
If you think, for example, of bread prices, hypothetically, if you take away something from the price of brown bread so that brown bread is more readily available than white bread at a lower price, your retail markets will just put up the price of brown bread until it's almost just under the price of white bread, and they will take what could have been VAT. That is simply what happens if you interfere with the food prices. But our social security plans and programmes must be checked regularly to see whether we have to increase that, or whether we should have food price increases. For example, as we did once before for a limited period, we could use food parcels for target communities.
The conclusion is that the market is responsible for the availability of maize and it has performed rather well over the last 10 years. [Time expired.]