Browsing: FCC

Fair Competition in Africa (theexchange.africa)

Africa’s Unfair, Fair Trade: Who Is Protecting the Public?

Industry and Trade

Unreported mergers and acquisitions, false advertising, or aggressive marketing tactics all place the farmer, the common trader, at odds with the market. 

A farmer in rural Tanzania incurs high costs of production particularly on the agro inputs used to grow, store and transport a given product. When this product gets to the market, it is put to competition with similar products produced by large corporate syndicates that can afford mass production at marginal cost. 

What it all means in simple terms, is the rural farmer’s prices are higher than the syndicated prices and so the farmer cannot sell and is forced to lower prices to meet the competition. In the long run, suffering high costs of production and minimal returns, the farmer is forced into a perpetual cycle of poverty.   This is simply not fair.

A consumer unwittingly buys a box of milk under the assumption it is pure cow

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An aerial view of Dar es Salaam, one of Africa's fastest growing cities. www.theexchange.africa

Tanzania: Unfair competition driving the common man out!

Tanzania

In Tanzania, the Fair Competition Commission (FCC) is responsible for promoting and protecting effective competition in trade and commerce as well as protecting consumers from unfair and misleading market conduct.

Without such an entity, companies use false advertising to capture markets, mergers of large firms occur undermining smaller businesses unfairly and the end-user, the consumer, is put at threat.

It is for this reason that Tanzania has recently passed the Fair Competition Order which sets out the thresholds for mergers that should be reported to the Fair Competition Commission (the FCC). In this most recent Order, Tanzania moved the merger notification threshold from USD 360,000 to USD 1.6 million.…