It is common knowledge that people cry when they chop onions. But in Bangladesh, even a look at this essential kitchen item at the grocer's can bring tears to a buyer's eyes. Why that is so everyone knows here. And it is the unpredictability of the bulb's price, which is in the habit of skyrocketing often without rhyme or reason. Obviously, being not something sentient, onion by itself cannot do anything unless the market operators dealing in this commodity irrationally create supply crisis in the market. And that traders are driven solely by profit motive, not altruism, is also common knowledge. So, if they find the conditions suitable they will lose no opportunity to artificially drive up the price of a commodity to make profit, even super-profit. And there is nothing surprising about that. But what is surprising is the government's knee-jerk response to such predictable price hike of essential commodities, which in most cases fail to improve the situation.
The latest instance of onion price shooting up by about a hundred per cent in the retail market was when India banned export of onion on Friday (December 8). Just within hours of the Indian ban, the local variety of the bulb was found selling at city's Karwan Bazar kitchen market at over Tk.200 a kilogramme (kg), while the day before the ban, the price was Tk. 130 per kg. And according to the state-owned autonomous trading body, the Trading Corporation of Bangladesh (TCB), too, the price of local variety of onion which was selling between Tk.105 and Tk.125 per kg a week before (last Friday), has now risen to between Tk. 180 and Tk.190 per kg. Similarly, imported onions are also much dearer now than a week before (the price increased by around 78 to 88 per cent per kg). Considering the speed with which the traders both at the retailers' and wholesalers' ends pushed up onion price, one cannot help wonder at the efficiency of their manipulative nexus.
When reporters asked retailers the reason for the sudden spike in onion price, their instant answer, as expected, was the Indian ban. It is as though the existing stock of onion in the market has evaporated overnight.
But should the Indian ban make any difference seeing that there was already a virtual embargo on onion import from India following October 28 when that country fixed the vegetable's minimum export price at USD800 per tonne? For, at that rate, importing the commodity would make no business sense. So, the rise in onion price immediately after India's announcement of the export ban is totally irrational. In some places, traders say, the rain due to the recent low pressure in the bay submerged harvest-ready onion fields under water. As a result, farmers could not collect their crop for a couple of days and hence the price hike. The excuses are many and they are often used to justify the unjustifiable.
The Directorate of National Consumer Rights Protection (DNCRP), the government's quasi-judicial body, as usual, carried out raids on different kitchen markets and punished errant traders. Small wonder that such actions by DNCRP could not strike fear into the hearts of market manipulators. Since the locally grown variety can meet only around 85 per cent of the country's total demand for the vegetable, the government should have a long-term policy to control onion market through timely import of the commodity.
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