# Algeria: It is visibly the Venezuelan syndrome which threatens Algeria with a surge in prices affecting basic products such as sardines, milk and medicines. All the products that delighted the palates of the poor have become rich foods.
Seen from most African countries, it is hard to believe that the food prices announced by the National Statistics Office (ONS) are real. However, this is indeed the case: all prices have taken the lift.
The rate of inflation is so high that some fruits are no longer sold by the kilo, but by the unit, like this banana on the shelves of Ardis supermarkets. You have to pay up to 180 Algerian dinars to hope to bite one, or some 1.36 dollars at the official rate of the local currency. As for Senegal, the price of a whole kilogram of bananas does not exceed 1.5 dollars and in the Maghreb, in neighboring Morocco, the price per kilo varies between 1 dollar for the local banana and 1.6 dollars for the imported one, there is reason to wonder about the extent of the crisis that Algeria is going through.
The banana is actually just one example among many, since all products, including those considered to be intended for the poor, are affected by this surge in prices. This Wednesday, January 6, the Algerian Part news site took an interest in sardines which have always been “the poor man’s fish, as lovers of good cuisine call it (and which) has become a luxury product in Algeria. practically inaccessible to the most modest purses “.
Thus, according to ONS statistics, at least last November, for the kilo of this precious source of protein and Omega 3, small Algerian stock exchanges were forced to pay up to 678.22 dinars, i.e. some 5.13 dollars at the official rate. In comparison to the dollar that the Moroccan household pays for a kilo of sardine or to the two dollars that the Senegalese woman pays for this same product, there is an abysmal gap.
Over the past twenty years, the price of a kilo of sardine has multiplied by 7.7 while it has hardly changed in Morocco since 2001.
Milk has also become an extremely scarce commodity as evidenced by the long queues to obtain a brick of the precious liquid. On social networks, the images that circulate are puzzling, so unrealistic they are. We see dozens of people in single file in front of a shop to get a liter of milk.
Even more serious is the shortage of life-saving drugs that the country can no longer afford. Two weeks ago, the Syndicate of community pharmacists sounded the alarm bell evoking the disappearance on the local market of some 253 drugs including molecules vital for chronic diseases.
It should be noted that this generalized rise in prices is largely explained by the shortage of foreign exchange facing the country following the fall in foreign exchange reserves which fell from nearly 200 billion dollars to less than 30 billion dollars. of dollars between 2014 and the end of 2020. This is partly what is at the origin of the depreciation of the dinar which went from nearly 100 dinars to the dollar to 210 dinars to the dollar at the level of the black market.
