Bread consumers in Freetown and its environs woke up yesterday morning to find that all bakeries failed to supply their sales agents due to the skyrocketing of a bag of flour at various shopping centres in the capital.
According to one bakery owner at Lumley, Alpha Bah in an interview with Awoko, he disclosed that importers in Freetown were now selling a bag of flour for Le130, 000.00 on wholesale while retailers were selling it much higher.
He added that if he bought the said flour to sell back to the public, he would be making skeleton profit considering the capital spent to buy it.
Mr Bah lamented that, “bread baking in Sierra Leone is a challenging business and government needs to ensure that prices are stable in the market, as consumers cannot afford to buy a single bread for Le1000.00 as we are not prepared to buy a single bag of flour for Le 130,000.00 and later sell it to the public for an exorbitant price”.
Some bread sellers around Freetown interviewed disclosed that the recent increase in the prices of flour and other basic food stuffs in the market had compounded the problem, and that bread sellers and bakers had decided not to sell until the government regularize the current increase.
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