After Eid holidays, consumer are suddenly taken by surprise when they find that chillis have become exorbitantly expensive in the Dhakas kitchen markets. On Friday, retail price of a kilogram of green chillies soared up to Tk 400 that was, not too long ago, was only below Tk 100.
The primary reason for such price hike of this spice is linked to the worsening flood situation in at least four divisions that damaged perishable green chillis to a large extent and disrupted their supplies to other parts of the country.
However, this untoward situation has boded well for some wholesalers to hoard this essential commodity in order to create an artificial crisis in the retail markets. And the chilli market condition this time is going to be the same unstable witnessed in July last year.
At that time, the prices of green chillies jumped to a record-high of Tk 800-1,000 per kg in the kitchen markets across the country soon after the the Eid-ul-Adha holidays. And that abnormal price spike and scarcity of green chillies in the retail markets were blamed on a syndicate of traders and lack of market monitoring.
Another essential spice, onion, is also now selling at higher than expected prices. A kg of onion is now priced between Tk 100 and 120 depending on its quality. This price hike of onion is prevalent in the retail markets despite its bulk imports from India in recent months.
Not only chillis and onions are selling at higher prices. Prices of other daily essential commodities like vegetables, meat, egg and chicken have increased unexpectedly. For instance, beef is being sold at Tk 800 to Tk 850 per kg while mutton is priced at Tk 1,050 to Tk 1,200 per kg and prices of almost all kinds of vegetables have went up conspicuously.
This price gouging of necessary products has suggested that the government has failed to break the back of hoarders, syndicates and price manipulators. This means there is no respite in sight from the skyrocketing price hikes of necessary products.
This is fairly common in our country that hoarders and traders take advantage of certain situation and every time, they give some lame excuses behind the rise of commodity prices and the most common one is the supply shortage due to natural disasters like flood or some other economic crises.
However, it has been proven over and over again that though there is little or no supply shortage of certain product in the market, hoarders and stockists create artificial crisis of that commodity in order to fleece consumers.
These unscrupulous traders and businessmen form an unholy nexus called syndicate under the very nose of concerned monitoring agencies like the Consumers Association of Bangladesh (CAB) though consumers are used to seeing some cosmetic actions by CAB in case of sudden price spike of a product by raiding and fining some warehouses.
We call on the governments concerned agencies to take punitive measures against dishonest wholesalers and syndicates before it is too late.
