Why are cereals, sugar, flour prices keep climbing while our policymakers stand powerless ?

The prices of essential commodities such as rice, flour, cooking oil or vegetables have been rising unrelentingly. And the government has still not been successful in its actions to keep inflation low.

In a press released  last year 2020 by the National Institute of Statistics (NIS) on the evolution of inflation during the first half of 2020, we can read that the general price level has increased by 2.5%. The main reasons being that the massive purchase of food products the day after the first series of restrictive measures taken in March 2020 by the government as part of the response against Covid-19 impacted the stocks. Also, delays in transports and labor shortage during the height of the pandemy have put pressures on the prices of imported and fresh products.

Ou national productions of many of these commodities still lag behind the demands. For instance, our country production capacity of rice is about 170 tons while the demand is estimated at about 576,940 tons. Hence we still have to rely on imports. Good luck to us! Because right now some commodities aren’t seeing actual shortages. But their supplies are tights for various reason including climates changes.

On the short-term, our government will have to find effective ways to control the prices. In shop we remark that the selling prices of rice for example is not the same with the regulatory prices of the Ministry of Commerce. On the long-term, the Mincommerce, the Minagri and other stakeholders will have to find ways to close the gap agricultural output  and consumers denands. This is a  several decades old challenge  that no one in the branches of government involved have solved. Who will be the Dr. M. S. Swaminathan  or the Yuan Longing  of Cameroon ?