Imported onion likely to ease prices in city wholesale market

The skyrocketing onion prices in the retail market are likely to ease as imported bulbs have put a break, at least temporarily, on the rise in wholesale prices in Kolkata, officials said on Wednesday.

National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India Ltd (Nafed) has also offloaded a large portion of its buffer stock of onion, which too helped in containing the price rise, they said.

Since the last few weeks, onion prices have remained northbound after crop loss in south India due to incessant rain. The retail price of the bulb had crossed Rs 90 a kg in Kolkata.

"Wholesale prices at Posta market have come down to Rs 55-60 a kg from a high of Rs 67.50 a few days ago. Some parcels of onion from Afghanistan and Egypt have arrived in the wholesale market which helped ease the price," agriculture analyst Sibu Malakar said.

Officials said that Nafed had created a buffer stock of 1 lakh tonne this year to manage onion prices. It is almost double that of the previous year.

According to reports, Nafed had already released 43,000 tonne from the buffer stock and another 22,000 tonne will be offloaded in the first week of November.

Rabindranath Kole, a member of the West Bengal government task force on agriculture, said that the price of onion would remain firm till December.

The Centre has also imposed a quantity restriction of 25 tonne for wholesalers and traders and two tonne for retailers to check price rise.