FOOD inflation in terms of rising prices of food items is bringing pressure on both urban and rural poor by limiting their intake of nutritious food in daily meals. Consequently, poor families are facing growing hardship in day-to-day life and much of it to be blamed on dishonest hoarders who want to create the artificial supply shortage to push the prices up.
The New Nation on Monday reported that poor people can’t arrange protein rich food for families as food prices are moving upward. Not only food prices like rice, lentils or onion are showing steadily upward, prices of vegetables also stayed high through the peak winter when it grows plenty in the field. Lack of nutritious food is triggering health crisis in rural areas forcing exodus of people to crowd out in towns and especially in Dhaka’s slums to face greater livelihood problems.
What appears really strange is that the country has enough food production and stock but since the cost of food production is high to claim higher price, a big section of people is failing to buy adequate food exposing them to suffer from growing food inflation. What matters is that when food inflation occurs, value of money proportionately decreases and family budgets of most poor to middle income people fail to support other costs of living after buying food. Medicine and treatment, education and such other essential expenditure suffer the worst.
Research by Development Research Initiative and University of Sussex made the disclosure that food price volatility in Bangladesh influences people’s food habits to move to further low cost and lower protein food. This in turn impacts the urban and rural poor. Food price volatility is the major challenge for the urban poor, as they have to struggle with limited income from physical labours. Rickshaw-pullers and day labourers suffer the worst from such food inflation.
Despite food self-sufficiency, the income gap between the rich and the poor and between the urban and rural areas is marginalizing the poor and the inflationary build up is going to further destabilize their life. There is a tendency that showed the rich will perhaps consume more food than they need in future while the poor will remain half fed because of higher food prices beyond their affordability level. So to be a self-reliant nation, we must have a proper food distribution and pricing policy and first of all not to allow any food inflation to start build up.
The problem is distributional and how to keep cost of food production at the low. Moreover, the food supply chain must be saved from dishonest hoarders and rent seekers. It needs coordinated efforts by the government and non-government stakeholders to keep food prices stable.
