Some residents in the Federal Capital Territory have decried the rate at which onion prices are escalating in the market.
Speaking with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Saturday in Abuja, residents said they can’t explain the cause of the sudden increment in the price of onion which has become an issue of national concern.
According to a retailer, identified as Yetunde Ogunbiyi, she said:
“As a trader when I want to sell for myself, the small ones are four for N100 and it is bought or leave, it doesn’t even sell for N20 and rarely will you see anyone that will sell for that amount and even if you get it will be very tiny.
“As a housewife, the way I use onions now is different, I use only on very important meals, as you know onions makes the taste of food delicious, so I use them strictly because as a seller I know the cost and so I value them a lot.
“And if I find the role of onions necessary in the cooking, I just slice them in the food,” she said. Hafsat Adedeji, a customer, on her part said that onions were now extremely expensive.
“At home, sometimes I don’t cook with onion, I just get the pepper and onion paste to support the cooking because to get onion is like you are bargaining with a gold seller,”
Another resident identified as Ruth Sunday speaking said;
“The onions, we normally get for N50 then is enough to be used four times but now it is not enough to boil N1,000 meat,” she said. Scholar Udoh, a housewife, says the pandemic could be blamed for the price hike in onions.
“During the pandemic, there was inter-state lockdown which I believe contributed because farmers could not travel to sell their harvest and so there was no even distribution of food.
“There was also the issue of flooding which made farmers lose a lot of food because the flooding this year was really bad, so I believe these factors must have a direct effect to the scarcity of onions and other foodstuffs in the market.
