KARACHI, Sept 1: With Ramazan only 12 days away consumers continue to receive price hike shocks in buying essential items mainly flour, chicken, pulses, vegetables, tetra milk.

The city government, which has been tasked to monitor inflationary trend in food items, appears helpless in providing any relief to the consumers before the holy month. In the absence of any price checking campaigns in the markets, traders and wholesalers will manipulate fixing higher rates for Ramazan.

The city government officials, who had been invested magisterial powers last year, did not take the initiative of checking price seriously, especially in the case of fresh milk, tetra milk and grocery items.

With no mechanism evolved by the city government for checking prices in the last one year, traders and market forces will definitely have an upper hand in the final pre-Ramazan meeting for fixing rates of their choice in the price list to be issued on September 6.

A market survey carried from August 1 to September 1, 2007 revealed an increase in various flour varieties because of continuous increase in wholesale prices of 100 kg wheat bag during the last two months despite a ban on wheat exports and a bumper wheat crop of 23.5 million tons.

Onion prices showed an increase of Rs6 per kg in the last one month. President Falahi Anjuman Wholesale Vegetable Market Super Highway Haji Shahjehan said that rains and floods in Balochistan had devastated the onion crop, resulting in price increase in local markets. He said wholesale onion prices had surged to Rs15 from Rs10-12 per kg.

He said new lots of potatoes from Quetta crop have arrived in the markets and it is selling at Rs12 per kg at wholesale. While old crop potatoes arriving from Punjab’s cold storages are selling between Rs8-9 per kg.

About tomatoes, he said that Balochistan’s crop had been satisfactory, resulting in decline in wholesale prices to Rs5-6 from Rs10-15 per kg. If the floods and rains would have not destroyed the crop, the consumers might have been getting it at Rs5 to Rs6 per kg, he added. Ginger and garlic are selling at Rs25-30 per kg in Sabzi Mandi.

Pulses’ prices have also been on the rise due to increase in world prices. The price of 16 kg ghee and cooking oil tins, which moves both ways on the world palm olein prices, has already been surging for the last few months. Packers have already made the maximum increase in the last few months.

A leading tetra milk producer has taken the lead for increasing the rates frequently. On September 1, Nestle Milk Pack’s one litre has become costlier to Rs44 from Rs42, while half litre price had risen to Rs25 from Rs24.

After failing to provide any relief in the loose milk, whose price has gone up to Rs34 a litre from Rs30 this year, the city government has also failed in controlling the rate of tetra milk despite two meetings with the leading producers.

The most stunning increase has been witnessed in the poultry live bird to Rs108 per kg as compared with Rs84 per kg followed by substantial rise in its meat to Rs188 from Rs140 per kg, and in egg prices to Rs45 from Rs37 a dozen.

Poultry dealers had been linking the price flare-up in prices to the mortality of 3.2 million birds and chicks at the farms in Karachi and other parts of the country due to rains, thunderstorm and scorching heat.

However, the federal and provincial governments had not yet bothered to counter check the big losses’ claim of Pakistan Poultry Association. As a result, the consumers had been paying phenomenal prices to buy white meat.