Editorial
OMS alternative essential
Strengthen TCB
No doubt the government's open market operation has indeed helped ease the plight of the poor, and even the low middle income people have resorted to buying rice from the fair price outlets of late. This has been due primarily to a sharp increase in the price of the coarse variety of rice, which happens to be the staple for these people, during the last year on an average of nearly 30 percent. The price of course rice has recorded a fall recently, but only just.
It is just as well that the government has expanded the OMS operation by doubling the number of outlets that serves nearly 150,000 families per day in the capital. This has caused a saving of nearly Taka 50 on the purchase of 5 KG of rice. Given that there has been a corresponding increase of other essential items of food the saving do come in handy to defray other expenses.
There are several lessons from the current situation that the government can draw. It will be well for the government to find out why, in spite of a good harvest, we are facing a crunch. One of the reasons is because of the rise in price of rice in the international market due to shortage in output in the major rice producing countries. And we failed to build up enough buffers at home, going for international purchase only in the face of a shortfall. But there are perhaps other reasons too which need to be gone into.
While market intervention is one of the safety nets, there is need to address the possible truck between wholesalers and big traders and the practice of hoarding by speculating over international market behaviour. It is better to build up our stock from internal procurement which clearly did not happen. One would also expect the TCB to be made more robust to be able to intervene more effectively.
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