Cold storage owners won\\\'t raise preservation rates

The country's cold storage owners have finally decided not to raise their preservation rates this year in the face of prevailing poor potato prices in the domestic market.

They finalised their decision at a recent meeting at Bangladesh Cold Storage Association (BCSA) office in the city. However, they urged the government to keep the power tariff unchanged.

Bangladesh Cold Storage Association (BCSA) president Md Jasim Uddin said, "An 80-kg bag of potatoes is selling at Tk 60 to Tk 70 at farm level whereas the price of one sack is around Tk 50 to Tk 60. Besides, transportation and other costs are there."

"The potato farmers are incurring loss. They will not be able to recover their production cost. For this reason we have decided to keep unchanged the cold storage rates this season. We will request the concerned authority not to increase the power tariff."

"If they hike the power tariff, then the cold storages should be exempted. We will send letters to the power and agriculture ministries in this regard," he said.

Regarding the poor price of potato, he said this is the cumulative effect of growing potato production in the last couple of years.

"Around 500,000 sacks of old potatoes are still in there cold storage. As the farmers are incurring loss with their new potatoes, we'll have to throw out old potatoes," Mr Uddin said.

The potato farmers paid Tk 360 for 80 kg potato sacks while Tk 220 for 50 kg potato-leno mesh bag to store in the cold storage in the last season and it will be same for this season also, according to BCSA.   

The potato farmers will start keeping potatoes in the cold storage at the end of this month and store it until the end of November.

The BCSA chairman said nearly 373 cold storages across the country could store 4.6 million tonnes of potatoes.

The price of a kilogram potato is around Tk 8 to Tk 10, according to the Trading Corporation of Bangladesh (TCB) on Wednesday.