We somehow forgot to give you advance notice about this year's annual "Bread Festival," which took place on Monday, alongside much other traditional August 20th holiday merriment. But maybe we were doing you a favor. Because if you had actually gone to partake in the various rustic kenyér-centered rituals (above, courtesy of hirszerzo.hu), there was a small chance you might have gotten caught up in an updated version of the classic angry peasant bread riot.

The trouble started last Wednesday, when industrial bakers across Hungary hiked their prices for "staple" breads by around 20%, raising the cost of a kilo of normal "white" bread from roughly Ft 145 to Ft 175 (from €.57 to €.67). Taking into account the mark-up of retailers, this will translate into per-kg prices of over Ft 200 for most consumers come October. Driving the hikes is a near-doubling of wheat prices - from Ft 26,000 per ton to more than Ft 50,000 - which is itself largely the result of the ongoing drought in Hungary, and a global rise in cereal prices. "The price of flour increased by 40% in August and an additional rise is expected towards October," said József Verli, secretary of the Hungarian Bakers' Association (Magyar Pékszövetség), adding that flour usually accounts for one-third of the costs of a loaf, with the other slices going to salaries and fuel for the ovens.

What's interesting is not that a doubling of grain prices would lead to a Ft 30 hike in the price of the average price of kilo of everyday bread. It's that in Hungary almost any meaningful rise in bread prices results in a messy public squabble that invariably suggests many or most Hungarians continue to think of bread not as a normal commodity but as some kind of public good, such as education or discounted student metro passes.

Then again, there is growing evidence that the market for bread in Hungary actually is run according to rules different from those of other everyday foodstuffs. Currently, the nation's competition office (GVH) is investigating the sector because of suspicions that industrial bakers may be acting as a cartel when negotiating as a group with retailers over prices. Because of this, the president of the Pékszövetség, Boldizsár Ilonka, recently refused to tell the media how much bakers are charging retailers, reports online business daily vg.hu.

So while the headlines about skyrocketing bread prices have led many consumers to assume that everyone in Hungary is taking the same hit, in reality no one really knows for sure. In the same interview in which he declined to say what his members are charging retailers, Ilonka said the shelf price for bread is going up by different amounts in different parts of the country, and at different retailers. For now, the foreign-owned hypermarket chains have apparently been doing the best job of swallowing the wholesale price hikes.

Naturally, members of the government "responsible" for food and agricultural prices have done their best to further confuse the situation. After spending the first part of his tenure singing the traditional song about how farm prices are too low, Agriculture Minister and champion scare-monger József Gráf earlier this month began loudly warning about how food prices are too high, going so far as to say that if they continue to climb the government might temporarily cut value-added-taxes on food.

As for whether the increasingly yeasty prices of Hungarians' daily bread will lead to actual bread riots, this appears unlikely. On a reader forum on portal index.hu, last week someone started a thread entitled "The famine of Hungary 2007." But few other readers seemed to share this person's alarm, including one who noted that bread may soon again cost 3.60 - "just like in the old days" - except in euros, rather than forints.