The price of rice is coming down, albeit by a small margin. Though in the wholesale market, price has dropped, in the retail market nothing has changed until now. Rice traders are expecting that within a week, people can buy rice at a lowered price. But the price would not be the same when the rice market was stable and the coarse varieties of rice used to be sold at a price below TK 30 per kg and finer varieties below Tk 50 per kg. At present one has to spend around Tk 50 to buy the coarse varieties rice. So a mere Tk 2/3 drop in price per kg would not bring relief to buyers, the price has to come down even more.

The government has taken various measures to lower the price of rice. Rice price never spiked before as it has now. The food ministry is being forced to grapple with the situation. It is punishing the hoarders, sitting with the rice dealers, has opened the open marker sale (OMS) of rice. Earlier it waived the import duty on rice. But things have not changed. The situation has become so frustrating for the food ministry that it had to make contact with Myanmar for rice import at a critical time when diplomatic relations with that country are experiencing the all time low over Rohingya issue. Moreover, the government had to compromise with its policy of mandatory use of jute bag for rice and permitted its import in plastic bags so that its import cost becomes lower.

However, the present crisis with rice price only points to the fact that the food ministry was not well prepared for a situation like the present one. Had that not been the case, it would have made adequate stock of rice. Many times in the past, the price of the staple commodity spiked. But this time rice price started to increase as paddy crops in the haor (wetlands) areas of Sylhet region as well as other parts of the country were damaged by floods. Besides, crops over large areas were also damaged due to attack by "blast" diseases.    

When the farmers would get good harvest in future, it would automatically bring down rice price. But the present crisis has exposed the country’s vulnerability with the staple food glaringly. This should be taken as a hard lesson and prepare accordingly to increase domestic production of rice. If that cannot be done, people of the country would have to switch to wheat flour and others for survival and this would be considered as a failure for the government as a whole.