The Federal Government, through the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, will begin to roll out sanctions against members of trade associations guilty of anti-competitive practices, indiscriminate and irrational hike of food prices.
Chief Executive Officer of the FCCPC, Babatunde Irukera, said this during a forum organised by the commission to discuss fair food prices.
He said, the commission will monitor the market, and prices that are excessive or find exploitative conduct, or find that consumers are being taken advantage of will intervene by unlocking the bottlenecks.
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.
