World Food Day: Visitors Decry High Cost Of Items

A cross section of visitors
who participated in the celebration of this year’s World Food Day at the Isaac Boro Park in Port Harcourt have decried the high cost of commodities at the venue.
Some of the respondents accused farmers and participants of taking undue advantage of the event to sell their produce and other products at exorbitant prices.
According to them, the intention of the event was to showcase the products the farmers and other agro people have come up with within the year, and also make such directly available to consumers, thereby eliminating the involvement of middlemen.
Unfortunately, they say the event was taking another dimension as gold diggers use the event to sell their products at high prices even when they were not farmers or producers of any products.
“Some of them are mere businessmen and women who just take advantage to rip off members of the public,” they said.
However, some of the suspected traders who spoke to The Tide while acknowledging that they were not real farmers absolved themselves of blame.
According to them, the event could not be restricted to farmers alone.
They claimed that their participation also gave colour to the event even as they blamed the general recession for the increase in prices of commodities.
It would be recalled that the Rivers State Commissioner for Agriculture while speaking on the practice where some participants display products that they did not actually produce during such events said her ministry allocated stands to all the 23 LGAs to forestall such occurrence.
However, The Tide gathered that the arrangement cannot be fool proof to shield traders from participating.