Prices are skyrocketing, the Trade Minister is a failure, government is incompetent, corrupt businessmen are holding the nation to a ransom — that’s the sense one gets from glancing through the newspapers, or watching the Deshi channels. The thing is, this whole narrative based on an obsession with ’syndicates’ — unscrupulous businessmen in cahoots with corrupt politicians — is at most a minor, side story. Much of the price rises we are seeing are likely to be explained by simple interactions of supply and demand.
And while the media is busy hunting syndicates, talk show pundits are castigating the Trade Minister, and the Trade Minister is busy trying to preach the businessmen to ‘not make excessive profit’, no one is talking about the real danger: monsoon is about to fail across South and South East Asia, and there is a real danger of skyrocketing rice prices in 2010.
Jyoti,
What? The “great” Motia Chouwdhury has failed to control skyrocketing food prices? what happened to the democratic magic that Hasina claimed would fix ALL food prices?? all your economic theories that “during AL regimes food prices always went down?” And Now you are blaming the monsoon?? which hasnt even arived yet?
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Kgazi, I think CORRUPT AL ministers and their Indian overlords conspired to delay the monsoon. Let’s call in the army to stop this MASTANI.
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Excuse the irritated sarcasm. I tried to make the arguments as clearly as I could: syndicates weren’t an issue in the past and they are not an issue now. If you can’t follow the logic, then it’s probably because I can’t write any better.
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Jyoti – thats not sarcasm, thats the reality of digital Bangladesh!!
But you missed my point too – our Begum Motia is doing no better than BNP or CTG !! Election was won for food prices, now what?? Everything’s skyrocketing – crime, prices, traffic mess, load-shedding . . .
It’s just a matter of time when army must be **invited** by either the People, or Hasina herself, to do something. Lets wait and see.
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Jyoti,
Thanks for this piece. One favour, can you make the graph image in your piece linkable so that we can see a larger version. Hard to read it the way it is now.
Rice price has been remarkably holding steady. Partial hoi choi on the price rise is due to lack of news in the media. We have 12 channels now, hungry for news. So price rise et al is always a good story. My informal, unscientific survey of local folks however did not seem that worried the way they were worried when the price hit the roof last year. It would have been a completely different story had this been the price of rice. So, as you said if India’s production is hampered then, the world, along with Bangladesh, is set to see a huge jump in rice price. So what are the ways, Bangladesh can protect itself? Stock up on rice? Start importing early? Build more storages?
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Asif, I’ve uploaded a bigger chart. It’s not just your unscientific survey. Official data also show that food price inflation in the year to June 2009 was 0.3 per cent, the lowest rate since 2000 (when the series begins).
As for the media chasing news, see this item from Shamokal:
http://www.samakal.com.bd/details.php?news=13&action=main&option=single&news_id=16310&pub_no=85
Apparently eggplant and chili prices have come off a bit from the beginning of Ramadan. But surely that’s what you’d expect! High eggplant prices in the beginning of Ramadan, when everyone all of a sudden starts frying beguni, shouldn’t be news. Nor should be the fall in price after a few days!
As for your question about what the government can do, I’d have thought the first thing is to try to make sure that the existing crop doesn’t fail. I am no farmer, and can be totally wrong here. But my understanding is that a crop has just been planted, and the lack of rain will affect this crop.
Is it possible to use irrigation to avoid a crop failure? I don’t know. Even if it is, irrigation will require electricity, so the load shedding situation will get worse.
Is there any other innovative/indigenous solution to this? I don’t know. As Fugstar would say, we need people with the spirit of the ganj to explore this.
Failing all this, importing early and building storages would seem like the way to go.
The point is, this is the discussion we need to have, instead of obsessing over syndicates etc.
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Media is absolutely right to chase the news, cos it was the same AL activists during CTG last year’s Ramadan who were screaming against spiralling begun & onion prices. This year they have suddenly become technical with “supply & demand” theories to defend their disaster.
With AL’s failure to control ANY of the public services (crime, load shedding, tenderbaji, traffic etc) it is obvious that they have failed to control food prices also, proving not only that election promises on food prices were just huffing and puffing, but AL also lacks the ’spirit of the ganj’ big time !!
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