The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, an agency of the Federal Government, has announced that it would start enforcing penalties against trade association members who engage in anti-competitive behavior and unjustified price increases for food.

The FCCPC’s Chief Executive Officer, Babatunde Irukera, said this on Tuesday during a forum the commission hosted to talk about fair food prices.

‘Fair food prices in Nigeria: A high-level forum for better competition’ was the forum’s tagline.

“We will continue to monitor the market, and where we discover exorbitant prices, exploitative behavior, or consumer exploitation, we will intervene,” he declared. Unlocking the bottlenecks is one approach to intervene.

That is what I just said, associations that come together to determine at what price beans should be sold, associations that come together to decide that nobody in a particular market should take yam, beans or rice from any other person except their members, we will proceed against them.”

According to Irukera, some trade unions had constituted cartels to engage in anti-competitive practices that have led to price gouging of basic food items.

“Competition regulation and consumer protection is not only to regulate the big companies. It is not only to regulate the formal sector. It is also to regulate the informal sector.

“In a place like Nigeria, it is even more critical to find a strategy to regulate the informal sector because at the end of the day the vast majority of our economy is informal”, Irukera said.