Browsing: Tanzania Fair Competition Commission

• Price point remains a key magnet for fakes across East Africa. Counterfeit products are often cheaper than their genuine counterparts, making them easy picks for people shopping for a bargain.
• Some of the most counterfeited products in the region include pharmaceuticals, pesticides, electronics, cosmetics, alcohol, and cigarettes.
• According to the East African Business Council, counterfeit products, primarily fast-moving consumer goods, are costing East African states between US$500 million and US$1 billion per year.

Counterfeiting sticks like a sore thump or a bad hangover causing a big headache for governments and policymakers across East Africa as rising number of products including pesticides, cigarettes, and alcohol become deeply affected by the menace.

Some of the most counterfeited products in the region include pharmaceuticals, electronics, cosmetics, liquor, and cigarettes. Other products that are often counterfeited are clothing, shoes, and accessories, as well as automobile parts such as batteries.

The illegal trade of …

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 …