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Spiralling prices
15 January 2008, 18:00 PM
Photo: AFP
I want to convey my sincere thanks to Dr. M. Moniruzzaman for his article on price stability published in The Daily Star on 4 January 2008. He has dissected the root cause of volatile market instability and suggested how we can come out of this problem and counter the situation in the coming days. It (scarcity of rice) may worsen due to increasing population and loss of cultivable land due to natural disasters like global warming or floods. While reading the article, I remember that in 1973-74, we used to go weekly to bring rice, wheat, edible oil, butter oil, salt and sugar from nearby ration dealer and it's stamped with date in that card that we took the ration for the said duration. So, no one could have their ration before the next scheduled date. Now, the government should handle the situation strongly and must implement VGD, VGF, TR, RMP and FFW to help the poor and vulnerable groups.
Also re-introduction of the rationing system in the urban areas, especially for rice, wheat, edible oil and sugar as well as for upazilla (thana) level has to be considered.
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The businessmen alone could not be blamed for the rice price hike. What we observed during the last few days is that our economists, government high officials, hon'ble advisers, all were in chorus to blame the businessmen as the main culprits for this unbearable price hike. We were more surprised to note that the people in the departments concerned who knew the supply and demand situation and were supposed to notify the government of the ensuing disaster, totally forgot the very simple theory of "demand-and-supply" which regulates the price situation of any essential item anywhere in the world, not to speak of rice which is our staple food.
So our leaders who are running the administration should have planned food security. Instead of following the economic theory of 'demand-and-supply, our bosses were blaming the businessmen and importers.I can give an example of my own. I buy only one month's ration of rice at a time. I believe many people of my income group do that like me. The common and moderate income group people cannot hoard rice. The very poor ones, who live on daily income, cannot afford to buy 10kg at a time. So the reason for increase in the prices of food items was the imbalance in the demand-supply situation.
Now the government has realised the truth and announced that rice would be imported very soon.
Shafiqul Islam On e-mail
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