FRAUD IN THE MARKET PLACE
Many fresh fruit and vegetable sellers are fraudulent, contends Julius Ingweye
Akorshi loves fruits. He loves them fresh. On his way from work in Port Harcourt, he stopped over by the roadside to buy some for his family, no matter how expensive they might be. “I must choose between paying hospital bills and eating fruits daily,” he whispered to himself. After all, “Let food be your medicine and medicine your food”, Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine had advised. He knew from biology that fruits boost immunity and strong immunity is a bulwark against disease.
He picked a fat pawpaw. It looked green. He wanted to drop it and leave. “Oga buy am. Na ripe pawpaw. No mind as e dey green oo! E ripe well, well”, Atlakor tried to convince him. On a second thought, he bent down and pressed the pawpaw with his fingers. “It is soft and should be ripe.” he counselled himself. He paid and left with his fruit.
At home, his wife took the pawpaw to prepare their dinner. Relaxing in the sitting room, he heard the wife scream from the kitchen. “How much did you pay for this pawpaw”? she asked. “Five hundred naira”, he replied.
“What a waste of money!” she shouted back. “Why?” he asked.
“Because it is not ripe and there is no possibility of it ripening”, she said in frustration.
Akorshi’s case is not a rare one. Many Nigerians face this frustration daily as they shop for fresh fruits and vegetables. Unripe mango, sour orange without juice, rotten bunch of leafy vegetables wrapped with fresh ones and over-matured okra sold as tender fruits. The list is long!
Fresh food is uncooked, wet and neither processed nor dried. Fresh foods are high in water content, rich in nutrients, and highly perishable-easily subjected to spoilage if not properly preserved. Examples of fresh foods include fruits like pawpaw, orange, tomatoes, pineapple, mango and banana; vegetables like okra, water leaf, pumpkin leaves, bitter leaf and; animal proteins like eggs, milk and meat. Preserving fresh foods especially fruits and vegetables in a country without constant electricity is a nightmare, hence, many households prefer buying them daily at higher costs to bypass preservation.
The thing is that we don’t carry test kits to confirm the freshness and quality integrity of fruits and vegetables while shopping. In fact, we are not all post-harvest management experts to spot rotten eggs and vegetables or force-ripened fruits at first sight. To know a ripe fruit, we assess the colour. If it is red or yellow, as is the case with most fruits, we assume it is ripe. If we are not convinced, we feel them with our fingers to know whether they are soft. A soft fruit, under normal circumstances indicates ripeness, excluding rotten ones though. Unfortunately, many unscrupulous fruit and vegetable sellers use fraudulent means to soften fruits and cover-up rotten vegetables and present them as wholesome to consumers to attract higher prices.
Due to impatience, unscrupulous traders treat fruits with hot water, spread them in the sun, add calcium carbide, apples or fresh chilli pepper, wrap them in airtight containers (e.g. nylon bags) for some days to soften them for sale as ‘ripe’. Hastening the ripening of fruits give traders a better control and freedom to generate large number of fresh “ripe” fruits to supply consumers when they need it. But are the “ripe” fruits safe for customers’ consumption? The sale and consumption of carbide treated fruits, apart from ripping-off consumers of their hard-earned money, is dangerous to their health because it might cause them cancer. Also, force-ripened fruits lose their natural nutrients, taste and flavour. However, artificially ripened fruits can be spotted by their non-uniform colour. For instance, force-ripened mangoes will have both green and yellow patches on the skin while the flesh inside will be white or grey.
Aside impatience, there other causes for force-ripening of fruits. Fresh fruits and vegetables are highly perishable but the business is highly profitable to the sellers. However, availability of fruits and vegetables in Nigeria is highly inconsistent. The fruiting of trees and growing of vegetables is seasonal. In Nigeria, we’ve not done much practically to correct this high dependence on nature. We could have bred varieties that fruit all year round and establish favourable agronomic conditions to encourage them do so.
Unfortunately, Nigerians are not too keen on fruit and vegetable agriculture because we believe erroneously that oil money can buy us all the horticulture products we need from any part of the globe. But at what costs? I leave that for you to ponder. Tropical countries like Nigeria ought to be the ocean of fruits and vegetables, yet the only fruits and vegetables we have all year round in Nigeria are the apple, green beans, lettuce and cabbage mostly imported from temperate countries. Since traders are unable to consistently get supplies of quality fruits and vegetables to sell to consumers, in their own way, they ensure availability at all costs in a high demand context by using different means to force-ripe unripe fruits and cover-up rottenness in vegetables.
Markets work because participants pursue their self interest. Atlakor’s inability to offer Akorshi the pawpaw that is worth the full value of his money (which was his self-interest), by tricking him to buy what he would not have bought, if he knew the true status of the pawpaw, will lead to distrust. The distrust would cause chain of effects together called market failure. Market failure results when a market does not work as it supposed to. It is due to imperfections in market transactions like fraudulent behaviour. Market failure is a symptom of imperfect and underdeveloped market. The buyer and seller need to be on the same page as it concerns quality of the product. This will ensure that what is sold is as close in value/quality as possible to what the buyer intended to get. This is not achievable in failed market situations. If you had seen customers pay much higher for poor quality products (force- ripened fruits) compared to buyers of the same product of better quality (naturally ripened fruits) or information on product quality/value (e.g. rotten fruit and vegetables, improperly ripened or unripe fruits) not known to customers because they don’t have the means to know what they are buying, at the point of procurement, hence, convinced to buy inferior look alike, then you would have seen market failure in action. The consequences of market failure are far reaching. First it generates low-level equilibrium whereby market failure issues reinforce each other and thus prevent Akorshi and Atlakor from doing business freely with each other. Also, Akorshi might warn all his family, friends and colleagues not to do business with Atlakor. The loss of a customer like Akorshi who buys fruits everyday would reduce Atlakor’s income. A low income will decrease Atlakor’s ability to upgrade and expand her business by acquiring new innovations in fresh food business e.g. cooling rooms.
The outcome is that Atlakor, a roadside seller, will remain a roadside seller, wallowing in poverty. Second, if Atlakor cannot make enough profit from her business to acquire better innovations, how can she possibly hope to supply large quantities of fruits and vegetables to high value customers like oil companies, who need large quantities of high quality supplies at a time? Your answer is as good as mine. In the end, the people who monopolised the fresh fruits market in Port Harcourt, charging higher prices and rendering poor services will continue to do so and even worse, in the absence of a strong competition. Finally, the atmosphere of distrust will make consumers not to buy fruits and vegetables even from other sellers, on the slightest suspicion of imperfection, further reducing the income of fresh food sellers. Dr. Ingweye is a consultant on Agrofood Value Chains Development and lectures in the Department of Animal Science, University of Port Harcourt