With the Kiss Bak­ing Com­pa­ny al­ready in­creas­ing the price of its prod­ucts in Sep­tem­ber 2021 and sig­nalling its in­ten­tion to do so again come Jan­u­ary 10, the Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ) is call­ing for a boy­cott of the com­pa­ny.

In the MSJ’s first me­dia con­fer­ence of 2022, po­lit­i­cal leader David Ab­du­lah calls on peo­ple to sup­port com­mu­ni­ty bak­eries in­stead of Kiss. He al­so en­cour­ages peo­ple to make their bake and roti at home, us­ing recipes from on­line. He said this was cheap­er.

“Let us boy­cott Kiss. Let us show them that they ought not to have in­creased the price of bread by nine per cent be­cause the price of flour went up by nine or 10 per cent. Let us boy­cott them and show them that we the peo­ple have pow­er,” Ab­du­lah said.

It is not the first time Ab­du­lah called for a boy­cott of the com­pa­ny. Back in 2007 when he was the pres­i­dent of the Fed­er­a­tion of In­de­pen­dent Trade Unions and Non-Gov­ern­men­tal Or­gan­i­sa­tions (FI­TUN), he did the same when there was a price in­crease. He said that boy­cott was suc­cess­ful.

Ab­du­lah said the boy­cott is one of sev­er­al ac­tions that would give hope for a bet­ter life for all in Trinidad and To­ba­go by push­ing back against what he called neo-lib­er­al poli­cies as those who hold po­lit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic pow­er on­ly seek to serve each oth­er.

“We have to take ac­tion to bring about change, so this is one sim­ple ac­tion that we are propos­ing to­day. It is not go­ing to change the whole sys­tem, but it can demon­strate in a con­crete way that peo­ple have re­al pow­er.”

He said the pur­pose of the boy­cott was to force Kiss to change its price po­si­tion, not to put the com­pa­ny out of busi­ness.

Last Sep­tem­ber, Kiss in­creased the prices of its loaves of bread, cakes and pas­tries, say­ing that raw ma­te­r­i­al prices es­ca­lat­ed by as much as 30 per cent. It al­so said it ex­pe­ri­enced hikes in ship­ping costs as COVID-19 af­fect­ed glob­al sup­ply chains.

The com­pa­ny’s re­cent in­creas­es fol­lowed news from the Na­tion­al Flour Mills (NFM), which stat­ed it would in­crease the whole­sale price of flour by 15-22 per cent and sug­gest­ed a 19 per cent in­crease in the re­tail price of flour.

CEO Ian Mitchell said that with the cost of raw ma­te­r­i­al and ship­ping in­creas­ing, the NFM had no choice. In Au­gust, the com­pa­ny’s unau­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments showed that be­tween De­cem­ber 31, 2020, to June 30, 2021, there was an $11 mil­lion de­cline in prof­its com­pared to the same pe­ri­od the pre­vi­ous year. An in­ter­ven­tion by the Min­istry of Trade In­dus­try and Com­merce saw the com­pa­ny ad­just­ing its price in­creas­es down to 10 per cent for Hi­bis­cus Flour and Ibis Flour to 17 per cent.

How­ev­er, Ab­du­lah said the gov­ern­ment could find ways to en­sure the NFM does not im­ple­ment its price in­creas­es.

He sug­gest­ed that the gov­ern­ment could pump $14 mil­lion in­to NFM to keep the price down.

He al­so re­it­er­at­ed that T&T must re­lease its de­pen­dence on im­port­ed prod­ucts, rec­om­mend­ing that peo­ple use flour made from dasheen, yam, cas­sa­va and bread­fruit that farm­ers grow lo­cal­ly.