Trade Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon says she has been get­ting re­ports of price goug­ing in the af­ter­math of re­cent floods in parts of the coun­try.

“It’s the ex­pect­ed thing,” she said in an in­ter­view on CNC3’s Busi­ness Watch on Wednes­day.

“Usu­al­ly when you have a cri­sis and par­tic­u­lar­ly when you’ve had ex­ten­sive floods as we’ve seen over the last few days...whilst there are those who are be­ing very gen­er­ous, there are those who are tak­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty to in­crease prices be­yond which is fair.”

Gopee-Scoon said re­cent price in­creas­es have pri­mar­i­ly re­volved around poul­try and ap­pli­ances.

Weigh­ing in on the is­sue, T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA) CEO, Dr Ramesh Ramdeen said man­u­fac­tur­ers have been sub­si­diz­ing their of­fer­ings to dis­trib­u­tors and re­tail­ers, in ad­di­tion to do­nat­ing free items.

“Peo­ple be­ing who they are, they are try­ing to take ad­van­tage of the sit­u­a­tion and they are mark­ing up the prices at the re­tail lev­el,” he said.

Ramdeen said there have even been re­ports of peo­ple rais­ing the price of wa­ter but he point­ed out that the man­u­fac­tur­ers are not to blame, as some of them have been do­nat­ing the wa­ter as part of the re­lief ef­fort.

Su­per­mar­ket As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (SATT) pres­i­dent Ra­jiv Diptee added: “I have per­son­al­ly been in touch with most of my mem­ber­ship and we have ex­pe­ri­enced no dis­tor­tions in re­tail pric­ing, es­pe­cial­ly on the side of bot­tled wa­ter.”

He said SATT mem­bers had joined forces for re­lief dri­ves af­ter the flood­ing. Diptee said re­ports of price goug­ing were the re­sult of so­cial me­dia “fu­elling cir­cu­la­tion of these hy­pes.”

When asked if she has re­ceived any re­ports of price goug­ing ac­tiv­i­ty con­nect­ed to su­per­mar­kets, Paula Gopee-Scoon de­nied re­ceiv­ing such in­for­ma­tion, adding, “I think the in­ci­dents of these prac­tices have re­al­ly been few and far be­tween and much less than the gen­eros­i­ty dis­played by busi­ness­es.”

Diptee added that su­per­mar­kets are ex­pect­ing in­creas­es in price be­cause “where there is flood dam­age there are as­so­ci­at­ed costs.”

How­ev­er, Gopee-Scoon re­spond­ed: “Most of the poul­try pro­duc­ers have been un­af­fect­ed by the floods. In poul­try there should be ab­solute­ly no in­creas­es in prices.”