Staff Reporter :
Prices of essential items have gone up sky rocketing which has contributed to the rising trend of inflation in Bangladesh putting the economy in imminent crisis.
As a result, inflation in Bangladesh has broken the records in all sectors as it hit a nine-year high of 7.56 percent in June, the last fiscal year 2021-22.
Breaking all the records, food inflation reached to 8.37 percent in June, which was 8.30 percent in May.
At the end of June, the overall inflation rose 0.14 per cent from a month ago and the average inflation rate stood at 6.15 percent at the end of FY 2021-22, 0.85 percent more than the target, according to a report released by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) on Tuesday.
According to BBS data, inflation in food has increased to 8.37 percent at the end of June, which was 6.33 percent inflation in non-food items.
The people of the country are now under the utmost pressure in buying food, while the pressure of inflation is more in rural areas than urban people.
According to newly released BBS data, rural inflation rose to 8.09 percent at the end of June, while it was 6.62 percent inflation in urban areas during the same period.
Food inflation in rural areas has reached nearly to nine percent. At the end of June, food inflation in villages stood at 8.93 percent and the rate is above 7 percent in urban areas.
Earlier in May, this index rose to 7.42 percent. It jumped another 0.14 percent points in June.
The government had set out to keep inflation restricted at 5.30 percent last fiscal.
Meanwhile, Planning Minister MA Mannan agreed that the rate of inflation has increased.
“We have already discussed about inflation in the ECNEC meeting. Some strategic policy will be taken to tackle the inflation. We hope, everything will become normal after stoppage the Russia-Ukraine war,” he told reporters after the ECNEC meeting in Planning Ministry on Tuesday.
He also claimed that prices of some items like rice, lentil, oil and onion are started lowering.
“Prices of essentials will be lowered more in the end of July, but don’t say how much. Prices of edible oil have already been lowered and changes of rice price will also be happened at satisfactory level,” the Planning Minister hoped.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh’s readymade garments (RMG) industry is now bracing for another battle for survival as most factories are getting orders less than 30% of their capacity as record inflation rates across Europe and the US make consumers less willing to loosen their purse strings for new outfits and fashion accessories.
Textile exports had fallen from $34.13 billion to $27.95 billion in the last fiscal years.
Apart from the fall in demand, freight cost rose by almost four times and price of raw materials also increased by 15-20 percent, along with other inputs.
