The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission will start enforcing penalties against trade association members who engage in anti-competitive behaviour, such as the indiscriminate and unreasonable increase of food prices.
This was said on Tuesday by Babatunde Irukera, the FCCPC’s chief executive officer, at a forum the commission hosted to talk about equitable food prices.
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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.”
According to Irukera, some trade unions had constituted cartels to engage in anti-competitive practices that have led to price gouging of basic food items.
He noted that taking a hard line against indiscriminate food price hikes had become imperative in light of the president’s declaration of food security as a national emergency last week.
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.”
