Bangladesh: Commission for agricultural produce

Published 25 Feb,2021 via The Financial Express - Market volatility remains endemically an irritant and at times causes economic haemorrhage not only to consumers and producers but also to this country. Some like to call it a sellers' market. If this is true and tolerable to an extent, the more intriguing type called syndicated business somehow continues to operate in defiance of government-recommended price levels. If the essentials are the imported ones, it is the consumers who are hurt most. But if it is produce like staples, cooking oil, spices or other items of daily uses, traders are always on the lookout to deprive producers of fair prices and cash in as much as they can on deliberate supply disruption at the expense of consumers.

Right now the prices of both rice and cooking oil are going up and traders have shown no inclination to comply with the government order to sell the items at the prices it has fixed. The apprehension is that traders are playing their own familiar game with the objective of pushing prices further on the eve of and during the holy month of Ramzan. Of the demand for 2.2 million tonnes of edible oil, 90 per cent is met by import of the item. So, traders have a better chance of making the most of the huge deficit ahead of the religious festival when the demand for cooking oil goes up.

If this imported item can be used as a pretext for fattening their coffer, what about rice? Paddy production has increased over the years to a level of self-sufficiency with exceptions like the crop loss due to repeated floods and cyclone Amphan last year. Here traders such as millers, hoarders and middlemen have become accustomed to eating the cream but farmers who are feeding the nation have long suffered on account of sluggish prices at the growers' level. For years farmers had to incur losses because the production cost was higher than the market price.