The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) has stated that it will take action against trade association members who raise basic food prices indiscriminately.
The FCCPC’s CEO, Babatunde Irukera, spoke on Tuesday at a forum organized by the commission to examine equitable food prices.
‘Fair food prices in Nigeria: A high-level forum for better competition,’ was the theme of the event.
Irukera stated that the federal government will make no place for anti-competitive practices 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 critical to stand firm against indiscriminate food price increases, especially now that 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.”
