Yaounde, Sept 12 - Cameroon's bakers raised the price of bread by 33 percent on Wednesday due to a sharp rise in world wheat prices, prompting protests from trade unions dismayed at rising living costs in the central African country.
The price of a standard 200 gram loaf of bread rose by 50 CFA francs to 200 CFA francs, or around $0.42 -- a steep rise for a country where more than 42 percent of people live on less than one dollar a day.
"We had to take this measure in order to survive a sharp increase in the price of wheat in the world," Jean-Claude Kapoua, president of the National Bakers Union of Cameroon, told Reuters.
With global demand for wheat up and supply down due to bad weather in key growing areas like Canada, Europe and Australia, benchmark wheat futures on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) surged above $9 a bushel for the first time on Wednesday.
Kapoua said the price of a bag of wheat flour in Cameroon had risen to 22,000 CFA francs from 18,000 francs last month.
Like many tropical African countries, Cameroon imports all the flour it needs from Europe -- where wheat prices hit record levels last week -- because there are no local substitutes to make Western-style bread.
Rising flour prices meant Cameroonians had expected a bread price hike, but not such a big one, said Jean-Marie Zambo, secretary general of the Cameroon Workers' Union Confederation.
"This is very bad news for our people," he told Reuters.
Zambo said the bread price increase followed price rises for many other basic goods including rice, another key staple.
Rising living costs have become a focus for increasingly vocal protests in a number of African countries.
The government of Cameroon's southern neighbour Gabon called a meeting with business leaders a fortnight ago to discuss how to mitigate the effects on the population of rising food prices which it described as "excessive and not corresponding to any economic reality".