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Rice prices here have even increased by around 9-10 percent in the last month in my area.
In which area do you live? As far as I know, the government has warehouses for basic food supplies, especially rice, spread across every city district and this functions to maintain a stable distribution of commodity needs. An increase of 10% is actually quite high, in my area it has been quite stable since the pandemic ended. Do farmers in your area only trade their products locally?
It is true, if this is implemented or carried out by the central government instructing regional governments, it may not increase until it reaches 10%. But now in reality this is also happening where I am, where the government has failed to make policies and there is no food warehouse to maintain the stability of basic food prices, so that when there is a shortage of food needs prices rise very high.
In addition, this price increase is of course due to the government's mistake in protecting the mafia collectors. Because they buy from farmers at low prices but they sell at high prices in the market, this is what the current government doesn't know what they want. This is what happened to farmers, their crops were bought at low prices by collectors, resulting in an imbalance of farmers with very expensive fertilizer prices, so rice farmers suffered huge losses.
And maybe there is no more capital for reinvestment, sad. If the government wants to eradicate high food prices one by one, it must improve the welfare of farmers by stabilizing the prices of farmers' production of rice, chilies, etc. which of course is followed by very expensive fertilizer so that it costs nothing. There needs to be a balance for farmers so that food prices will also be stable.
There can only be one thing that the government can do so they can easily take action without opposition blocking what they are about to do, Buy the farms of the farmers. If it's not profitable for farmers, the government will buy their farmland. It's been happening worldwide.
All prices of things that are for sale are running high so it's not surprising anymore. Gas prices have doubled since the pandemic. No country today is exempted from this crisis.
The wheat supply chain was blamed because of the Ukraine war and rice in Asia I think was also because India stopped exporting because they wanted food security.