Gov’t to crack down on price violators

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) will start closing down traders and market vendors that sell chicken and pork significantly beyond their farm gate prices.

Trade and Industry Secretary Ramon Lopez told reporters that traders had been charging high prices for their products, forcing market vendors to adjust their prices up as well.

To address this, he said the Department of Agriculture (DA) has agreed to allow DTI to issue a notice of violation on erring market players.

“We have an agreement that if we monitor and we see a violation, we can already issue the notice of violation. The next step there is if they don’t change their prices, we could close their shop and confiscate their products,” he said.

This develops shortly after the DA started imposing a suggested retail prices (SRP) on basic agricultural goods in a bid to avoid the abnormal movement of prices in the market.

The costly prices, which come amid record high inflation, have prompted the government to search for ways to cushion the impact on the public, which has been struggling to make ends meet as the Duterte administration’s first tax reform law contributed to raising the prices of some consumer goods.

Lopez said traders and the retailers could impose only around P45 on top of the farm gate price of chicken and about P75 on top of the farm gate price of pork.

This, however, is not the case on the ground. For example, Lopez cited that some vendors sold poultry at P140 to P150 a kilo as of earlier this week, which was P10 higher than what should have been the allowed price.

He also admitted that vendors might be pushed into a corner by the current setup, especially after traders slapped a high price on the products they sell to vendors.

“In other words, we won’t just monitor the retailer. It’s the whole supply chain,” he said.

It is not clear if DTI will also look into other agricultural products. However, Lopez said that closing shop was just one of a number of options currently under consideration.

Lopez said that the government was also considering to put up a shop in the wet market that would sell these products at the right price.

He said they were also considering to impose price ceilings on basic commodities.

“If they still don’t want to [adjust their prices], we should just do price control. If we can’t close all, then we should just have a price ceiling so it will be clear that this is the [right] price,” he said.