Even as consumers continue to agonize over the recent spate of increases in rice prices, retail vendors were this week bellyaching over official intervention to provide the commodity at a price below the current market price.
When Stabroek Business visited two city markets earlier this week retail vendors were crying foul over what they claim is an unfair intervention by government which would undermine their sales. But up to last Wednes-day one of the two state outlets identified to sell the cheaper rice to consumers in the city was still offering only white – at $325 per gallon – the same price at which it was being offered in the city municipal markets.
The price disparity that will result from the government’s intervention is likely to arise in the case of brown rice. Last Wednesday, stalls in Bourda and Stabroek markets were offering the Karibee brand at $600 per gallon and the super brown at $560.00 per gallon. When Stabroek Business checked with the New Guyana Marketing Corporation outlet on Wednesday no brown rice was being offered for sale but an official there disclosed that brown rice would have been available from Thursday and that it would be sold “considerably cheaper” than the price being demanded on the open market.
But vendors in both markets were insisting that the more than doubling of the retail price for rice was the result of increases imposed by the millers and had nothing to do with arbitrary price hikes.
Government is insisting that the current mill gate prices for rice remain well below the prices being required by both wholesalers and retailers but the authorities are yet to determine where the difficulties lie in the supply chain. Agricuture Minister Robert Persaud was quoted as saying recently that government was seeking to ensure that consumers are not made to pay unnecessarily high prices for rice.
When Stabroek Business visited the New GMC outlet on Wednesday several consumers were making enquiries about the availability of brown rice and an official disclosed that the distribution system would be seeking to guard against bulk purchases by people who may then seek to re-sell at a higher price.
Vendors in Bourda Mar-ket, meanwhile, told Stabroek Business that government’s announcement that the New GMC and the Guyana Rice Development Board would be offering rice at a cheaper price had already resulted in a drop in sales of brown rice, particularly. One vendor told Stabroek Business that she believed that government had the machinery to investigate the problems in the supply chain quickly and to ensure that the commodity reached wholesalers at a price that would allow for a reduction from the current high levels.
The vendor said that this approach was far better than the government simply intervening in the rice retail market.
