Food Cartels Are Nothing New: Ibn Taymiyyah Discussed Them Seven Centuries Ago

Imagine this: global palm oil prices are rising, the rupiah is weakening, and exporting should be more profitable. Yet, Indonesian palm oil farmers are receiving lower prices than usual. In June 2026, independent farmers were selling fresh fruit bunches for just Rp1,800 per kilogram, well below their production costs. This anomaly prompted the National Police Food Task Force to investigate, suspecting that certain parties are deliberately manipulating prices to profit at the farmers’ expense. This is a classic food cartel.

Interestingly, this phenomenon is not a modern invention. Seven centuries ago, a scholar in Damascus named Ibn Taymiyyah had already coined a term for such practices: ihtikar. Born in Harran in 1263 AD, the Hanbali jurist argued for a concept he called si’r al-’adl, or the price of justice. He believed prices should form naturally through market forces, but he drew a sharp line at manipulation. For Ibn Taymiyyah, when a group hoards goods to create artificial scarcity or colludes to fix prices, it ceases to be a free market. It becomes oppression.

This perspective differs starkly from modern economics, which often treats cartels as a technical ‘market failure’ to be corrected with regulation. Ibn Taymiyyah saw it as a moral failure requiring immediate state intervention. He argued that if the authorities remain silent while traders exploit the people’s need for staple foods, the state is complicit in the injustice. His warning echoes today: as long as a handful of players can game the system and the response remains sluggish, the seven-century-old problem of ihtikar will continue to haunt the market.