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Business Reporter

GRAIN milling companies have pledged to protect consumers from unjustified price increases through establishment of a monitoring mechanism on the sale of their products.

Grain Millers Association (GMAZ) head of ethics and compliance committee, Mr Alvin Muparutsa, said millers had set up a joint national price monitoring programme with the Confederation of Zimbabwe Retailers to protect consumers.

“We are jointly undertaking the national price monitoring initiative to curb price distortions and ensure compliance on prices of mealie-meal, rice, salt, sugar beans and flour-related products,” he said.

“This initiative is a self regulation mechanism by industry players and should not be confused with price control. The latter (price control) is implemented by a third party who in most cases would not be involved in the production chain of the concerned industry.”

The country has experienced incessant price increases on goods and services largely fuelled by speculative parallel market exchange rates that ride on prevailing foreign currency shortages.

This week the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe availed a US$500 million facility from an offshore line of credit, which is being channelled towards the interbank platform. Due to subdued capacity utilisation in the manufacturing sector, Zimbabwe requires significant amounts of foreign currency to buy goods and services from outside the country.

“Millers, as the suppliers of the said basic commodities, have a moral obligation to protect consumers from unwarranted price increases by some unscrupulous business dealers and monitoring prices of these commodities is one such way.

“Starting this week, this committee and the GMAZ secretariat will be moving from towns and cities, holding meetings with retailers explaining to them the objective of this initiative so that there is buy-in from the sector,” said Mr Muparutsa.

“We will start by engaging Bulawayo retailers, followed by their Gweru counterparts before moving to Mutare and Masvingo, just to mention a few cities and towns.”

He said their major thrust was to ascertain the challenges retailers could be facing, which were making it difficult for them to comply with the prices the two parties have agreed on products supplied by GMAZ members.

“We are doing this so that we amicably move together and eradicate price distortions. We will soon be announcing to the media the industry’s agreed prices of our commodities and this will be done after these consultations, which will be followed next week by the deployment of 150 GMAZ price monitors who will be visiting all shops throughout the country,” said Mr Muparutsa.

“We, therefore, humbly appeal to the business community and the general public to kindly work together with our price monitoring teams when they visit their entities.”

He explained that the initiative was not a price control measure but a voluntary price monitoring initiative by the industry.

— @okazunga