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CNN
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President-elect Donald Trump says the fact that Americans can’t afford food will be a relic of the past. “They’re going to be able to afford their groceries very soon,” he said Thursday before ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, where he was honored as the Times’ Person of the Year.

Americans paid 22% more for groceries last month compared to when Trump left office in January 2021, according to November Consumer Price Index data released earlier this week. And compared to February 2020, before the pandemic, Americans paid 27% more for groceries in November.

Trump mentioned “an old woman” who went to a grocery store to buy three apples. “She put it on the counter, looked, saw the price and said, ‘Would you excuse me?’ And she took one of the apples back to the fridge,” he said.

During the campaign, Trump focused primarily on drilling more oil to help Americans afford more food. But before his return to the White House, his strategy to lower food prices has shifted slightly to focus on supply chain issues in addition to producing more oil.

Trump spoke in front of a table of packaged foods and used a press conference in August to draw attention to food inflation during his presidential campaign. “Food prices have skyrocketed,” he said.

“If I win, I will immediately lower prices from day one,” Trump continued. “We’re going to drill, baby, drill,” he said, referring to increasing domestic oil production. “This will bring down the prices of everything.”

(Economists generally prefer that prices in an economy rise slightly rather than fall, a scenario called deflation because it can cause people to postpone purchases. And often when prices for goods rise significantly is declining, it is because more people are unemployed and… The economy is in a downturn.)

“It’s hard to bring things down once they’re high,” Trump said in his Time Magazine Person of the Year interview published Thursday, referring to food prices. “You know, it’s very hard… But I think they will do it. I think that energy will bring them down.”

“I think a better supply chain will bring them down,” he continued. “You know, the supply chain is still broken.”

This was one of the main factors that led to an increase in food prices during the pandemic: the availability of ships decreased and freight times increased, contributing to the shortage of imported food. But these problems have now been more or less solved.

Monthly import freight volumes recently reached near record highs, according to the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates, which produced monthly Global Port Tracker reports.

At Trump’s August press conference discussing food prices, he mentioned “supply chain issues” as a cause of increased housing costs, but not as a cause of increased food costs.

His somewhat new approach to food prices comes as weekly U.S. crude oil production hit a new record of 13.6 million barrels per day on Dec. 6, federal data from 1983 show. Trump himself admitted this on Thursday, saying: “There is no country in the world” that produces more oil than the United States. This has helped lower gasoline prices, which in turn has helped lower the cost of transporting food to grocery stores across the country.

Experts told CNN that more drilling, even if feasible, wouldn’t have much of an impact on lower food prices due to a variety of other factors. Focusing on improving supply chains could prove to be a more effective strategy, although it won’t be easy to get started.

For example, traffic on two key international shipping routes has come to a dramatic standstill: the Suez Canal due to months of attacks on ships by Houthi fighters; and the Panama Canal due to a historic drought.

Even as Trump helps improve supply chain problems, other measures he has promised, including sweeping tariffs and mass deportations of migrants who entered the country illegally, risk significantly driving up food prices.

When it comes to deportation, the food and agriculture industries rely heavily on migrant workers. Without them, these industries will likely face labor shortages that could force them to raise wages. The higher labor costs would then presumably be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. It could also lead to food shortages if there are not enough workers to support food production, which would likely put further upward pressure on prices.