|
This exploitation of consumers must stop
2006-02-20 07:05:02
By Editor
Tanzania is in the grip of famine, and unscrupulous traders have begun to take advantage of the situation to make as much money as possible while the natural calamity lasts.
The prices ofv commodities such as rice, beans and maize flour, which form the staple diet of the vast majority of Tanzanians, have soared over the past few months following diminished supply to consumers.
This, in itself, is not surprising when one takes into account the principle of supply and demand, although many will agree that food prices have been unnecessarily inflated to an extent of forcing people to change their feeding habits.
We do not expect the prices of rain-dependent food crops such as rice, maize potatoes and beans to remain at their pre-drought levels, but we take exception to the hiking of prices of food commodities whose supply has nothing to do with the rain.
For instance, some traders have raised the prices of commodities like eggs, fish, chicken and other animal products such as beef, citing drought!
We fail to see the relation between the lack of rain and the supply of such products, and view this as nothing but a shameful ploy to exploit consumers who are already paying through the nose to put a square meal on their tables.
Consumers, especially those in the lower income bracket, are powerless, and at the mercy of profiteering traders. This is one of the downsides of a free market.
It makes us wonder what’s next. Are we about to see daladala fares go up, not because of high fuel and running costs, but drought?
We know that the government cannot set the price of maize, rice or chicken as these are determined by market forces.
We, however, ask food traders to be ashamed of their insatiable hunger for huge profits made at the expense of beleaguered consumers.
Refugees: It’s time Tanzania had respite
Reports that thousands of Burundian refugees are pouring into Tanzania, ostensibly to escape hunger and insecurity in their homeland, are cause for grave concern.
The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR confirmed last week that almost 4,000 Burundians had entered Tanzania since the start of the year and the numbers kept growing at an average rate of 100 new arrivals a day.
Tanzania, home to the biggest refugee population in Africa, had received with joy reports that tens of thousands of Burundian refugees had returned home under a voluntary repatriation programme run by UNHCR since 2002, and that thousands more were earmarked for repatriation in the coming months.
But it now seems that we are headed back for square one. Hopes that Tanzania was about to rid itself of the refugee burden under which it had groaned for over a decade have been dashed.
The arrival into Tanzania in the 1990s of hundreds of thousands of refugees from trouble spots in the Great Lakes Region meant that the country had to share its meagre resources with the migrants.
Wanton environmental destruction and insecurity are synonymous with areas that have large refugee populations in the country and that is why we are saying for the umpteenth time that the sooner all refugees return to their homelands, the better.
|
