Commission to investigate "intermediary schemes" in food markets and retail chains was created in Almaty

 

Akim of Almaty Yerbolat Dossaev chaired a working meeting with representatives of state bodies and food trade facilities.

According to the Department of Entrepreneurship and Investments of Almaty, in order to stabilize prices for food products, together with regional akimats, daily monitoring of prices on the shelves of retail chains, markets and convenience stores is being carried out. Over the past week, there has been no sharp increase in prices for socially important food products (SIFP), except for minor price fluctuations for vegetable products, which is associated with the cost of storing products.

To prevent unreasonable price increases, work is underway with domestic producers. One of the effective mechanisms is the soft loans program, which provides interest-free current loans to manufacturers and retail chains to fix prices for a long period. As of today, an agreement has been signed with a large egg producer LLP Alsad Kazakhstan (occupies 30% of the market share), which has fixed selling prices at 400 tenge per dozen until January 31, 2024. Since the beginning of the agreement, a positive effect on the stabilization of prices for eggs has been noted, the decrease was from 487 to 462 tenge per tenge.

Preferential loans were also issued to retail chains Magnum (5.7 billion tenge for 19 Socially significant food items) and Toymart (430.2 million tenge for 12 Socially significant food items) to stabilize prices until the end of April this year. Due to the purchase of vegetables at low prices from farmers during the harvest season, the price on the shelf during the off-season (from September 2021 to April 2022) is fixed at up to 30% below market prices.

As a result of the meeting, Akim of Almaty Erbolat Dosaev called on representatives of other retail chains to take an active part in the city's program of providing preferential revolving loans, and also warned representatives of large markets not to allow unreasonable excess of prices.

“A decision was made to establish a commission to investigate “intermediary schemes”. Within the framework of the commission, it is necessary to analyze manufacturers and suppliers of food products, identify and stop the chains of resellers, strengthen monitoring of prices for Socially significant food products, and take appropriate measures if the trade markup exceeds 15%,” said Yerbolat Dossaev.