Despite an abundance of agricultural products, Algerians face dizzying price increases in the mercurial. Explanations.
Customers wear masks at the Ali Melah market in central Algiers, and concern about a declining Covid (no more deaths for almost a week) in Algeria is replaced by another: coping with the dizzying rise in prices of fruits and vegetables at the beginning of Ramadan. “Every year, it’s the same madness, loose Ali, retired. But this time, the high cost of fruit, vegetables, and meat is breaking all records… It’s war in Ukraine making prices explode. “The prices of certain fruits and vegetables have doubled, foodstuffs in grocery stores have increased by at least 100 to 200 dinars [63 euro cents to 1.27 euro]”, specifies a lady carrying a huge basket in the crowded market aisles. “Besides, with my husband, we no longer do our shopping in convenience stores or supermarkets, we now prefer our grocery stores or the butchers in our neighborhood, they know us and agree to give us credit,” adds this mother.
900 cans of oil purchased in one day
According to indications from the Association for the Protection and Guidance of Consumers and their Environment (Apoce), the increase in the price of sheepmeat has reached up to 20% in different regions of the country, while the price of zucchini, widely used in traditional dishes, has seen an increase of more than 100%!
“We are accused of being speculators, but finally! !! It is the customers, with the fever of purchases which grips them during Ramadan, which put pressure on the offer… They bought, on the first day of Ramadan, and in a single market in Algiers, a little more than 900 cans of five-liter edible oil . In one day! defends a seller of aromatic herbs, very popular during this sacred month.
Each year, authorities, consumer associations, or the media point to the “irrational behavior” of Algerians during the month of Ramadan. A mixture of panic in the face of possible shortages and surges of appetite to compensate for the long day of fasting. “Everyone would like to have everything for themselves. If we have nine million households, we must have some 18 million cans of oil stored in the cupboards, as well as 9 million bags of semolina”, protests, in a newspaper, Hacene Menouar, president of the association. El Aman.
The authorities are trying to cope
And yet, the authorities have undertaken a series of measures: adding an additional quota of 5,000 tonnes of milk powder to the quantities usually distributed (14,599 tonnes/month) for the benefit of 120 milk production units under agreement with the National Milk Board; “sufficient” availability of wheat stocks; daily production of 24,000 tons of flour, 11,000 tons of semolina and 4,333 tons of oil, the establishment of local public markets, prohibition of the export of certain products such as sugar, pasta, oil, wheat derivatives, eggs or potatoes, etc.
But these measures do not seem to contain the shock of price increases and shortages that have affected certain products for a few weeks, well before the start of the holy month.
Even the key bakery sector is not spared. Shortages – and rising prices – of yeast, semolina, and edible oil are threatening several bakeries with closure, industry officials say, despite authorities helping artisan bakers maintain their profit margins. – by exempting them from certain professional taxes in order to avoid the rise in the price of baguettes. According to the National Association of Merchants and Craftsmen, three thousand bakers have gone down in the last three years.
The anarchy of distribution networks
Why can’t the authorities manage to curb a repetitive phenomenon that takes place every Ramadan? According to experts, and beyond the global situation of rising food prices – a 20% increase for vegetable oils and dairy derivatives, for example – it is the control of commercial distribution networks that is a problem in Algeria.
On the columns of El Watan, economics expert Abderrahmane Hadef points to “the disorganization of distribution circuits with a lack of regulation at the level of large distributors, what is called in the jargon the super wholesalers, who control the market and position themselves between the producers/importers and the rest of the distribution circuit”. “It is time to reflect on the creation of what is known throughout the world by the purchasing groups which can be registered within the framework of the public-private partnership by creating clearly identified companies and whose regulation would be done more easily”, pleads this expert.
In the same newspaper, Hacene Menouar, of the El Aman consumer protection association, criticizes the “non-mastery of the field of the marketing of agricultural products” and the absence of “programmed production with an agricultural card to know what should be planted, produced and at what time of the year”.
The influence of the informal
Other experts deplore the fact that, under pressure from the security and control services or for the lure of easy gain, many players in the agricultural sector are falling into the informal sector. Mustapha Zebdi, of the Association for the Protection and Orientation of Consumers and their Environment, attributes, for example, the unprecedented rise, over a year, of white meat not only to the significant increase in the price of poultry feed and chicks but especially to the situation of the sector dominated by the informal sector: 80% of poultry farmers are not known to the agricultural services. “The pricing mechanism is therefore not known, how do you expect chicken prices to be stable and controlled”, regrets Mustapha Zebdi.
“It is anarchy that can be verified in certain wholesale fruit and vegetable markets where transactions are not made by transaction vouchers [invoices]. This is called the lack of transparency in business transactions, or, in crude terms, tax evasion,” he notes.
“An unknowing agricultural giant”
Beyond better regulation of agricultural production circuits, the other challenge is to focus on the Algerian nutrition system which, impacted by the hierarchy of prices, promotes “dietary imbalances with an overconsumption of inexpensive calories made up of imported and subsidized products, and an under-consumption of fruits, fresh vegetables, meat and fish”, as Omar Bessaoud notes, professor of agricultural economics at the Institute of Mediterranean Agronomy in Montpellier. This expert warns against the increase in the “number of children under five, obese adults and elderly women of childbearing age with anemia”. Factor “which testifies to dietary imbalances and a decline in the Mediterranean diet”. “Algeria has the means to get out of the trap of imports and subsidies which impoverish both our financial resources and our diets,” maintains an expert. But we need a clearer, more integrated policy in the agricultural field. We are an unwitting agricultural giant.”
