CAIRO — The
price of groceries was going up everywhere Souad Amer checked, so it was with
nervous hope that she waded into a government-subsidized market in her
Cairo neighborhood where a loudspeaker blared a jingle promising cheap essentials for
Ramadan.
اضافة اعلان
Browsing boxes of dates — which
Egyptians traditionally eat to break their daytime fast during the Muslim holy month —
Amer asked someone to check the price of one box. It was 20 pounds, slightly more
than $1. Much more than last year. Like nearly everything else.
“OK, just leave it where it is,” said Amer,
43, her shoulders drooping. She had three children to feed at home and already
knew her Ramadan table would feature little meat and no duck, their yearly
holiday tradition. “We just buy, buy, buy, spend, spend, spend,” she said.
Ramadan arrives in a week: a festive season
when people across the
Middle East and North Africa normally look forward to
gatherings with friends and family, new clothes, and feasts that begin after
sundown and stretch late into the night. But this year, prices of staples such
as oil, sugar, flour, and rice have surged across the region, thanks to global
supply chain snarls and the war between Russia and Ukraine, which export many
essential commodities and foods, including wheat, fertilizer, and gas.
That reality threatens to crush household and
government budgets alike in countries that had nothing to spare, raising the
possibility of the kind of mass popular unrest not seen since the Arab Spring
protests a decade ago, which stemmed in part from soaring food prices.
Drought is already ravaging
Morocco’s economy. Tunisia’s deeply indebted government was struggling to pay for wheat
imports even before the war broke out. Lebanon is shuddering under an economic
collapse. Syria, already raked by war and growing poverty, is now facing prices
for tea and dates that have doubled or even tripled since last Ramadan,
according to Damascus residents.
In Egypt videos of ordinary people venting
about food prices have gone viral on social media under the hashtag “revolution
of the hungry,” and the government has been forced to move swiftly to blunt the
blow.
In a clear sign of the distress, Egypt on
Wednesday announced that it had opened talks with the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) over a new financial assistance package, its third in six years,
noting in a statement that the shock of the Ukraine war had caused prices to
rise to “unprecedented” levels and had sent foreign investors fleeing.
The announcement followed a raft of other
measures meant to stabilize the economy and blunt the pain of citizens,
including capping the price of unsubsidized bread, adding more Egyptians to
welfare rolls, allowing the Egyptian pound to devalue against the dollar,
raising interest rates and accelerating pension and pay bumps for government
employees.
The IMF director in Egypt, Celine Allard,
expressed readiness to help.
“The rapidly changing global environment and
spillovers related to the war in
Ukraine are posing important challenges for
countries around the world, including Egypt,” she said in a statement.
Relief cannot come soon enough in a country
where about one-third of the population lives in poverty, surviving on less
than about $2 a day.
“No one’s buying because people are afraid of
the prices. There’s no money,” said Hisham Ali, 62, who works at a fruit stand
in Cairo’s middle-class Abbasiya neighborhood. He could not blame his
customers: With his salary of less than $6 a day, he said, he could barely
afford to feed his children fruit.
Better-off Egyptians said they would not be
saving any money this year or would skip buying new clothes, a cutback akin to
going without presents at Christmas.
Unlike
Ramadans past, Ali said, “Nothing so
far gives you a feeling that something good is about to happen.”
Several countries have banned the export of
certain crops in a bid to keep prices down at home.
Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer,
blocked farmers from exporting wheat and offered incentives for them to grow
more, even as it considered overhauling its bread subsidy program — a lifeline
for millions of citizens for decades — to save money. In Morocco, where people
rely on tomatoes, chickpeas, beans, and lentils during Ramadan, the government
was suspending tomato exports amid the worst drought in three decades.
Nadia Kabbaj, a caterer in Rabat,
Morocco’s
capital, was gearing up to sell traditional Ramadan sweets like chebakia, a
sesame cookie fried with honey that many eat to break their fast. With the
costs of flour, almonds, butter, and oil all rising and her employees pleading
for raises to cover their expenses, she said she had to raise her prices by 10
percent, even as she watched customers cut back sharply on their orders.
Still, she was lucky to be open at all. Many
businesses did not offer Ramadan treats this year, she said, because
ingredients were pricier and their customers less able to pay.
Some Moroccans would be able to adjust by
consuming less or conserving oil by grilling food instead of frying, she said.
“But poor people are suffering,” she added.
“What are they going to eat to break the fast?”
In
Tunisia and Egypt, there were rumblings of
the kind of anti-government sentiment that led to the overthrow of dictators in
both countries in 2011.
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