The Federal Government will now punish members of trade associations who engage in anti-competitive behavior or raise food prices in a way that is both indiscriminate and illogical through the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission.
On Tuesday, July 18, the FCCPC CEO, Babatunde Irukera, revealed this at a forum the commision hosted to talk about fair food prices. This comes following last week’s national emergency declaration by President Bola Tinubu on food security.
Irukera claimed that the need for sanctions arose from some trade unions creating cartels to engage in anti-competitive behavior that resulted in price gouging of staple foods.
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.
“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.”
