Vital issues about victuals

Wednesday 9th October, 2024

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has met a group of food importers and discussed, inter alia, ways and means of making imported food items available to the public at affordable prices, according to media reports. He seems to think that discussions and moral suasion would help persuade the mudalali fraternity to refrain from profit maximisation for the sake of the public. If the government is really keen to serve the interests of the public, it should make a decisive intervention to tackle the problem of market cartelisation, which enables unscrupulous importers and wholesalers to jack up prices and exploit the public.

Egg prices have increased again after a temporary slump. Supporters of the new dispensation naively went so far as to attribute the egg price decrease to Dissanayake’s ascension to the presidency! What egg wholesalers with cold storage facilities did was to bring the egg prices down artificially so that they could buy eggs on the cheap and hoard them before increasing the selling prices. They have the best of both worlds while egg producers and consumers are gnashing their teeth.

Large-scale rice millers have offered to reduce the prices of rice. Never do they act out of altruism, and why have they become mindful of the maximum retail prices all of a sudden? It is not difficult to see through their game plan. They can afford to reduce prices temporarily but their small-scale counterparts cannot do so as they lack the wherewithal. If the prices of rice drop drastically, the small timers in the milling trade will go belly up; the rice market will be even less competitive in such an eventuality, and the Millers’ Mafia will be able to exploit the public to their heart’s content by increasing prices again.

Big-time millers leverage their wealth and political connections to deprive their smaller counterparts of funds for purchasing paddy by delaying bank loans, and fill their silos with paddy bought at lower prices. By the time the small-scale millers receive funds, there is hardly any paddy left for them to purchase and what is available is of inferior quality. This happens year in, year out.

Successive governments have done precious little to help the small-scale millers. The new government should ensure that funds are available for them to buy paddy when harvesting commences. The Paddy Marketing Board should be provided with funds and adequate storage facilities to compete with the Millers’ Mafia so that the farmer and the consumer will benefit. The JVP/NPP government is duty bound to do so because the JVP torched more than 240 agrarian service centres with paddy storage facilities in the late 1980s, according to Maithripala Sirisena, whom it helped become President in 2015.

The Millers’ Mafia employs another ruse to bring the prices of paddy down. It increases the prices of rice ahead of the harvesting season, compelling the government to import rice. When the state-owned warehouses are full with imported rice, the big-scale millers reduce prices, causing the imported rice stocks to rot as locally grown rice agrees with Sri Lankans’ palates more than the imported varieties. When the prices of rice fall, farmers have to sell their paddy at lower prices. After hoarding paddy, the crafty millers increase prices. Unsold imported rice stocks have to be disposed of as animal feed. The only way to end this despicable practice is to conduct raids and confiscate hoarded paddy. One can only hope that the JVP/NPP government will prove equal to the task of taking on the Millers’ Mafia.

Most people believed in the NPP’s pledges and rhetoric and voted for Dissanayake at last month’s presidential election. Having talked the talk—very eloquently at that––President Dissanayake now has to walk the walk. Unless the food importers and wholesalers stop exploiting the public, the government will have to get tough with them unlike the previous governments that chose to play ball with them for obvious reasons.

Wholesalers and importers of food and other essentials fleece the public with impunity thanks to their political links and slush funds, which help them have politicians eating out of their hands. Financiers’ interests take precedence over those of electors after elections.

There is a pressing need to ensure that politicians and their parties disclose the sources of funding so that the public will know who is in the pay of unscrupulous importers and traders. Let the SLPP, the UNP, the SJB, the NPP and other political parties be urged to reveal whether they have received any funds from such elements.