Consumers are unlikely to get immediate respite from the current soaring food prices. Despite the slew of measures initiated by the Centre to check inflation, top officials in the Ministry of Food and Consumer Affairs remain skeptical about getting desired results.
Though the current surging price of essential food items like pulses, rice, wheat and cooking oils is attributed to higher price levels in global commodity markets, the officials believe that the supply-demand mismatch in the domestic market is the cause of concern as far as the domestic price level is concerned.
The government is its keeping fingers crossed, expecting some temporary relief to come by way of the arrival of foodgrains after the harvesting of rabi crop in the next few weeks. But the projections about likely production shortfall on the rabi crop front remain a dampener.
According to the second advance estimate of rabi crop production, released by the Agriculture Ministry recently, oil seed production at 9.59 million tonnes represents a 6.7 per cent decrease over the last year’s production record. The production of pulses is estimated at 8.57 million tones which represents an 8.8 per cent decline over last year’s production. Even wheat production is estimated to be lower as compared to last year’s figure. The estimated production of 74.81 MT is 1.3 per cent lower. Rice production too is expected to be lower by about 1 per cent. Agriculture Secretary P K Mishra has said that these production shortfalls are due to hostile weather conditions.
Measures
As a response to the situation, the Centre has initiated several measures including releasing its stock of pulses to open market. Apart from this, the Centre has imposed ban on export of cooking oil and cut on the import duty.
The private buyers are told to submit their detailed procurement to the government. The government also recently banned the export of certain varieties of rice.
The Commission for Agriculture Costs and Price (CACP) had already alerted the government about the possible rise in the inflation due to shortfall in the production of food items.
