The seemingly impossible hyperinflation suffered by consumers hogged media headlines for the better part of 2023. Price trends of basic food items in particular were unrelentingly jittery. Although laws in the country provide (in theory) protection to consumers, most people are worried about what they can afford to buy and eat. It is one thing to have laws, quite another to see them enforced properly.
The Consumer Rights Protection (CRPA), 2009, which had some provisions amended in 2017, provides consumer rights, as defined by the UN Consumer Bill of Rights. Right to Safety: Safeguarding against the goods that are hazardous to life and property. Of them, there are certain rights that include clauses like the 'right to be heard' and 'rights to redress'. Of late, consumers' overwhelming demand for rationalisation of prices in wholesale and kitchen markets of essentials are being heard loud and clear. Things get trickier when it comes to 'redress'. In Bangladesh, traders have always had an upper hand over consumers due to a lack of proper enforcement of existing laws. That being the case, consumers' rights have been wilfully trampled upon for decades by selling them goods, medicine or service at prices higher than the one mandated. Traders and sellers have knowingly sold adulterated goods and medicines and not stopped at selling goods and foodstuffs tainted with extremely hazardous ingredients that pose serious danger to human health. The list goes on.
This being the case, it goes a long way to explain how prices are manipulated at every link in the supply chain from manufacturers/ importers to wholesale distributors to retailers. Each of these segments is at liberty to form its own consortiums to artificially fix prices. The fact that every consumer has rights has been deliberately been concealed from people's perception, in that one can hardly find any advertisements on national media - both electronic and print. People hardly come across billboards and / or posters informing consumers about their rights. It is only recently that the general populace has come to know that a directorate exists for consumers' rights but there is no sustained national campaign to take the message of rights to the people so that they may begin to seek redress. Naturally, an 'awakened' consumer is bad for business and that would explain why there has been so little movement in this area.
The authorities have been forced to act because avarice is virtually on the rampage. The recent case of onion price manipulation is a good example. Price per kilogram had risen by Tk100 a day after neighbouring India had announced a halt to export of the same. The sheer vanity of suppliers had reached a stage when they thought it was fine to raise the price of onion per kilo by a whopping 71 per cent over the course of a day. Market intervention when it comes is short-lived because of the simple fact that the fines being levied on these traders are ridiculously inadequate! As pointed out by this newspaper recently: "Realising fines from traders has now become a useless ritual. In this case, the amount of total fines realised from 133 trading houses was Tk666,000 or, a paltry amount of Tk5,008 on an average. Does it hurt the traders who are making profit at astronomical levels?" This is the crux of the problem. Raise fines to astronomical levels so that breaking the law becomes too expensive. That will take care of half the problem.
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