BEIJING (AFP) - - China’s inflation rate was 7.7 percent in May, easing from April’s 8.5 percent, the government said Thursday, as analysts cautioned that some prices had been kept artificially in check.

Food prices have eased but, at the same time, price controls meant pent-up inflation had accumulated in the world’s fastest-growing major economy, according to economists.

“While agriculture seems now to be responding… there are other price pressures out there that are being severely repressed,” Standard Chartered economist Stephen Green said in a statement.

Inflation has become a global concern, with the US Federal Reserve now putting it on the top of its agenda in view of soaring energy and food prices.

The prices of food, a main driver of inflation in China since last year, continued to be an important factor last month, although they were rising at a less steep rate, according to the statistics bureau.

Food prices were up 19.9 percent in May from a year earlier, while the price of pork, the staple meat for hundreds of millions of Chinese, had soared 48 percent, it said.

But pork had risen a staggering 68.3 percent in April, suggesting there was now a more plentiful supply in response to government incentives.

At the same time, energy prices were being kept under control by the government, meaning local oil companies had not been permitted to pass rapidly rising global crude prices on to the consumers.

“We all know about fuel and electricity controls, but we hear reports of firms in the food and construction industries also being told not to raise prices,” said Green.

“There is a lot more bottled up inflation in this economy than meets the eye.”

In the first five months of the year, the consumer price index was up 8.1 percent from the same period in 2007, the National Bureau of Statistics said.

China has set an inflation target of 4.8 percent in 2008, an objective many observers believe will be almost impossible to achieve, given factors the government has little control over such as the price of imported goods.

The consumer price data was released a day after the government said producer prices had risen 8.2 percent in May, the fastest rate in nearly four years.

China should fight inflation by raising the interest rate at a “proper time”, the Bank of China, one of the nation’s main commercial lenders, said this week.