Partap: Grocery hired

While police protection was supposed to be free, Partap said, the cost of any payment to hire police would be passed on by such a grocery to its customers.

It was in the process of moving a motion yesterday — Private Members Day — in the House of Representatives that he severely criticised the Government “for its failure in containing food prices at affordable levels for the entire population”.

Turning to Prime Minister Patrick Manning, Partap condemned the PM’s food-prices consultation last year in Trinity College East as “a big flop.”

Partap listed many price-hikes in basic food items. He cited milk that had tripled in price over the past six years, whereby an 800 gramme milk pack rose from $15 to $47. Likewise in the same period dhal had risen from $1.47 per pound to $4, cheese from $10 per pound to $30, and doubles from $1 to $3 or $3.50.

“This is a man who goes to the supermarket,” chimed in Couva South MP Kelvin Ramnath supportively. Partap said last August’s National Budget had no measures to restrain food- prices.

He lamented that even as prices rose, the Government had failed to help local farmers who suffer from flooding, praedial larceny, and bad roads.

He quipped that he had experienced problems completing his notes for his speech because prices just kept rising, including a seven-cent hike in the cost of a pack of eggs last week.

Partap warned that inflation could make TT end like Guyana where, he jibed money was so valueless that it had to be pushed in a wheelbarrow by customers who were targeted by bandits who would seize everything, throw out the money and run off with the wheelbarrow.

Some 100,000 pensioners, he said, now struggle financially to live. He recalled the TT Association of Retired Persons (TTARP) saying its study had found 70 percent of people are under stress with their finances. He scoffed at the Ministry of Legal Affairs and Consumer Affairs which he said had failed to help anyone by publishing lists showing slight variations in prices of items at different supermarkets, saying no one would pay transport costs to go to another grocery to save just ten cents.

He scoffed that the Ministry of Social Development had failed last Christmas to get cheaper chicken to needy persons who held SmartCards.

The Government, he said, was now involved in a blame-game of ducking responsibility for rising prices, but blaming everyone else including foreign producers raising prices, local consumers making poor choices, and unscrupulous businessmen who profiteer. He accused the Government of under-paying farmers to effect a $4Million saving in flood–compensation quoted in the recent Finance (Supplementary Variation) (2007) Bill 2008. “Do you really want food production to increase? You are cheating the farmers. This is ‘Operation Do Nothing’”.