The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) has threatened to punish trade organization members that increase the cost of staple foods uniformly.
At a forum held by the commission to talk about fair food prices on Tuesday, Babatunde Irukera, the FCCPC’s chief executive officer, revealed this.
‘Fair food prices in Nigeria: A high-level forum for better competition’ was the theme of the event.
Irukera asserts that the federal government would make sure that there is no opportunity for anti-competitive behavior or unreasonable price increases in food.
“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.”
According to Irukera, 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.”