The Federal Government, in collaboration with the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), is set to impose sanctions on members of trade associations found guilty of engaging in anti-competitive practices and implementing unjustified and unreasonable increases in food prices.
The Chief Executive Officer of the FCCPC, Babatunde Irukera, made this announcement during a forum organized by the commission to address the issue of fair food prices.
The forum was titled ‘Fair food prices in Nigeria: A high-level forum for better competition’.
He 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. 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.”
As per Irukera’s statement, certain trade unions have formed cartels to partake in anti-competitive activities, resulting in the unfair inflation of prices for essential food items.
Given the recent declaration by the president of a national emergency on food security, Irukera stressed that it has become crucial to adopt a strict stance against unjustifiable increases in food prices.
Irukera said, “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.
