Collecting Prices for Food Security Programming

As a contribution towards standardizing price data collection, this paper aims to explore the core issues related to setting up a price monitoring system, also in countries where no such system currently exists. It describes the factors a country office needs to consider when designing such a system, namely:

• The objective of the price monitoring and its sustainability
• Selection of markets
• Selection of traders
• Selection of food commodities (and/or brands)
• Units of measure
• Frequency
• Technology
• Monitoring beyond food