Asrdow Zewdu and Tizita Bekele started the Tizita Bakeshop in February, after being encouraged by dinner guests impressed with the quality of their homemade injera, a brown Ethiopian flatbread. (Pamela Power/CBC)

The owners of a new Ethiopian bakery on Ottawa's Booth Street say they are struggling to deal with the soaring costs of their main ingredients, which more than doubled in the three months since the bakery opened, as grain prices skyrocketed worldwide.

Tizita Bekele and her husband Asrdow Zewdu started Tizita Bakeshop in February, after being encouraged by dinner guests impressed with the quality of their homemade injera, a brown Ethiopian flatbread. They began selling it for $3 a bag.

But they were soon forced to raise the price to $3.50.

"It was a kind of threat to our business," Zewdu said. "But what else could we do?"

Injera is made from self-raising wheat flour, barley and an iron-rich Ethiopian grain called teff.

"We used to buy 10 kg of teff for $16, $17. Now, we get it at $37 per 10 kg," said Zewdu. The price of self-raising wheat flour has gone up similarly, and the price of barley has gone up 40 per cent.

Zewdu said initially customers complained about the price increase.

"They thought that we were a bit greedy," said Zewdu. "I think some of them even tried to make it themselves, but they found out how expensive the self-raising flour, the teff flour has been."

Regular customer Goitom Tolde, who calls injera "a lovely food," said he believes Zewdu and Bekele had good reason to raise the price of the bread.

"It's a global raising price everywhere in the world, I think," he said.

Teff prices tougher in Ethiopia

Zewdu said he is worried about the disastrous effect the soaring prices could have on people in Ethiopia, where 100 kilograms of teff now costs as much as a college graduate would earn in a month.

"I don't know how the ordinary people would afford to buy 100 kilograms of teff," he said.

The price of other grains, including corn and rice, have similarly shot up in price.

As the Scotiabank commodity price index reported recently, Canada No. 1 grade wheat jumped to an extraordinary $798 a tonne in February 2008, more than three times the $252 a tonne it was averaging over each of the past two crop years.

In the past year, soaring prices have led to food riots in countries such as Hungary and Mexico, and India recently banned the export of rice except for high-end basmati.

According to the UN's World Food Program, the root causes of today's higher prices are rising energy costs, the almost decade-long drought in Australia (an important exporter), and the flourishing middle classes in China and India, who have developed a taste for grain-fed beef, pork and chicken. The diversion of grain away from the food supply chain to make biofuels such as ethanol has also been blamed.