The FederalG has disclosed plans to roll out sanctions against members of trade associations who are found guilty of indiscriminately increasing prices of food items.
The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, while making this known on behalf of the federal government also warned against anti-competitve practices.
Chief Executive Officer of the FCCPC, Babatunde Irukera, disclosed the intention of the government on Tuesday during a forum organised by the commission to discuss fair food prices.
During the forum titled ‘Fair food prices in Nigeria: A high-level forum for better competition’, the FCCPC boss said, “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.
According to him, one of the ways of intervening is unlocking the bottlenecks.”
“That is what I just 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.”
Irukera noted that some trade unions had constituted cartels to engage in anti-competitive practices that have led to price gouging of basic food items.
Furthermore, he insisted that taking a hard line against indiscriminate food price hikes had become imperative in light of the president’s declaration of food security as a national emergency last week.
“Competition regulation and consumer protection is not only to regulate the big companies. It is not only to regulate the formal sector. 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.