MOSCOW, October 24 (RIA Novosti) - Russian food producers and major retail chains have signed an agreement to freeze prices on certain food items for about three months, the Agriculture Ministry announced on Wednesday.
"Producers and sellers of foodstuffs signed an agreement to stabilize prices of certain socially important goods, on their own initiative," a ministry spokesman said.
In line with the agreement, prices of milk, eggs, vegetable oil, bread and kefir (a fermented milk drink) will be frozen from October 24 to January 31, 2008.
The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said on Wednesday that the agreement did not violate competition laws. However, the service said only producers and retailers whose market share does not exceed 20% would be able to freeze prices.
Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said the government should not freeze prices, but should work on stabilizing them. He said the latest measure could only be temporary, and called to fight "price shocks" instead of price growth as a whole.
"Freezing food prices is impossible. This is a market, and prices cannot be frozen on a market. It would be a mistake," the minister said.
He said price hikes in global food markets were a long-term phenomenon, opening up new opportunities to Russian agricultural producers.
Food price hikes have accelerated in Russia over the last few months, following trends on world markets. According to the country's statistics service, the fastest growth in September was demonstrated by rapeseed and soybean oil prices (13.5%), pasteurized milk (9.4%), fermented milk products (7.9%) and curds (7.4% - 7.5%).
Driven up by food price growth, consumer prices in Russia grew 7.5% in the first nine months of 2007, or 0.3% more than in the same period of last year. In September alone they climbed 0.8%, making the government's 8% inflation target for 2007 unrealistic.
