Unstable edible oil market
The skyrocketing cooking oil price has dealt another blow to the consumer public. Faced with losses as they are bound by the government-fixed price tag on the bottled cooking oil, refiners have slashed their supply substantially, thereby leaving the market at the mercy of the middlemen, who have taken full advantage of the situation to charge the customers unfairly. On this score, the refiners' point that the upward trend of oil price in the international market is behind their quandary cannot be dismissed out of hand. But what fails our understanding is why the government has been simply looking on while the crisis in the cooking oil market was going from bad to worse? And if the refiners' contention is grounded in fact, why hasn't it taken apt measures to offset the instability in the market or even revise the price of bottled oil in keeping with the international market as well as with the consumers' and the refiners' interests?
Unfortunately though, our past experience says that, whenever the government tried to fix the price of any essential commodity, the market had gone through similar hiccups. One wonders, why has it become the hallmark of the government intervention so much so that whenever it is in place to discipline the market, it rather worsens the consumers' misery? And what happened to the government's monitoring mechanism when supply shortage pushed up the price of loose soybean oil to
such an extent that it crossed the threshold price set for bottled oil?
The prevailing volatility in the cooking oil market should not be allowed to continue for long as it is hurtful to both the consumers and the producers. The government's trading wing, the Trading Corporation of Bangladesh (TCB), needs to play a hands-on role in this respect and create a buffer stock of different essential items including cooking oil in order to act as a countervailing force against any such price spike in the future.
In the present circumstances, the government must act fast to remove the cooking oil prices anomaly that is behind the endless suffering to the consumer public.
Comments