Members of trade associations who engage in indiscriminate inflation of basic food prices will soon have the government to contend with.
This is according to the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC).
Chief executive officer (CEO) of FCCPC, Babatunde Irukera, stated this at a forum organised by the commission to discuss fair food prices in Nigeria, with the theme, ‘Fair food prices in Nigeria: A high-level forum for better competition.’
Food inflation in Nigeria rose to 25.25 per cent in June, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), an increase from the 24.82 per cent recorded in the previous month.
To check food inflation and guarantee price stability, President Bola Tinubu recently declared a state of emergency on food insecurity.
Irukera said the federal government would ensure there is no room for anti-competitive practices and irrational hikes in food prices.
“We will continue to monitor the market, and where we find that prices are excessive or find exploitative conduct, or find that consumers are being taken advantage of, we will intervene. One of the ways of intervening is unlocking the bottlenecks,” he said.
“Associations that come together to determine at what price beans should be sold, associations that come together to decide that nobody in a particular market should take yam, beans or rice from any other person except their members, we will proceed against them.
“Some trade unions had constituted cartels to engage in anti-competitive practices that have led to price gouging of basic food items.”
Irukera reiterated that it is necessary to take a hard line against indiscriminate food price hikes, especially at a time when food security has been declared a national emergency.
“Competition regulation and consumer protection is not only to regulate the big companies. It is not only to regulate the formal sector,” he added.
“It is also to regulate the informal sector. In a place like Nigeria, it is even more critical to find a strategy to regulate the informal sector because, at the end of the day, the vast majority of our economy is informal.”
