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Prices - Cabinet Taskforce Meets Manufacturers
Zhean Gwaze, Financial Gazette
July 26, 2007

http://allafrica.com/stories/200707260855.html

THE cabinet taskforce on pricing and incomes stabilisation has begun engaging manufacturers who had stopped production due to a clampdown on industrial operations launched to force prices down.

Sources said the government was growing increasingly agitated by empty supermarket shelves and was planning to force manufacturers to increase production ahead of an election next year.

Chairman of the taskforce and Industry and International Trade Minister Obert Mpofu said the latest engagement with manufacturers was meant to address the challenges that industry had experienced due to the government clampdown on industry.

"We have enforcers on the ground who are assessing the situation and they will make recommendations to the cabinet taskforce. There are various committees representing various sectors of the industry and they make reports from time to time on things like the pricing formula which the businesses were using and what they intend to use," Mpofu said.

The government has threatened to withdraw permits and licences of businesses found defying the price freeze on products imposed last month.

Most shops are now without most basic commodities such as maize meal, sugar and salt. Consumers who resorted to a buying spree after the crack unit descended on market players with its order, forcing all goods in warehouses into supermarket shelves, are now on a desperate hunt for basic foodstuffs.

Last week President Robert Mugabe accused manufacturers of withholding products to create artificial shortages and stoke civil unrest.

"They are withholding products, thinking there will be a gnashing of teeth to force people to revolt against government. It is not our teeth that will be gnashing, it is theirs," President Mugabe said.

As a result, associations have sounded a warning to their members to take heed or face the consequences.

The Grain Millers Association of Zimbabwe (GMAZ) has asked its members to comply with the government decree while awaiting authority to increase the price of maize meal products.

"In the interim, while awaiting response from government, may all members operate within the confines of the law. Production must not stop, as the nation needs us. Any acts of violation will meet equal if not greater disdain," GMAZ last week wrote to its members.

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