THE government on day before yesterday directed the law enforcement agencies and Deputy Commissioners (DC) to arrest illegal rice hoarders in the country. The directive comes in the wake of introducing open market sales (OMS) of coarse rice at Tk. 30 per kg, double the previous year’s price, across the divisional and district towns in the country. Procuring price at a double rate from the OMS will undeniably put financial pressure on the people of the marginalised low-income segment.
However, the decision to manage the rice situation should have been made earlier since the rice trading sector in some way being dangerously manipulated by a syndicate for some time. It is a marriage of connivance between the men in power and the profit hungry traders. Most importantly, there apparently seems to be none to regulate and monitor the prices of rice. Thus, the price fixing mechanism has gone into the hands of a handful traders, importers and businessmen. They are forcing the public to purchase rice at an artificially hiked price.
The Food Minister and Commerce Minister jointly have blamed the rice mill owners and traders for hiking rice prices to put the government in trouble. They should learn to blame them for their incompetence also. It is easy to ask police arrest, but that is no solution of the problem. The problem has grown over a time.
Profiteering in such dubious manner by capitalising on food shortage situation is highly reprehensible.
The point, however, is temporary policing may be a stopgap measure to reprimand the culprits but it’s not a long-term solution to free the rice industry from the clutches of culprit traders.
Given this year’s unprecedented back-to-back natural disasters there is not only a shortage in production – thousands of acres of crop were washed-out. The said association or the unholy syndicate took full advantage of the situation by hoarding and then subsequently hiking the price to create a manmade crisis in the country. Moreover, these unscrupulous rice traders are also involved in spreading rumours over the shortage of rice through their syndicate. By now this has already resulted in a nationwide panic. The other point, which is more important than many other counts, is the government failure to maintain required minimum 60 days food staff in stock. Available data suggest that some 4 lakh tonnes of food grains are now in the govt stock. Ideally, it should be 6 lakh tonnes at the minimum. The government, more so the Food Ministry, has failed to assess or foresee the possible crisis which the country is now facing.
