To finance its imports of common wheat, durum wheat, and barley
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) announced on Wednesday the signing of a guaranteed sovereign loan of 150.5 million euros in favor of Tunisia, to finance its imports of common wheat, durum wheat and barley.
This is what emerges from an EBRD press release, consulted by the correspondent of the Anadolu Agency, while Tunisia is facing financial challenges related to the preservation of foreign currency assets on the local market.
The EBRD said it had “signed a sovereign-guaranteed loan of 150.5 million euros with the Cereals Office (ODC, a Tunisian public company) to finance imports of soft wheat, durum wheat and barley”. representing up to 15% of Tunisia’s annual consumption needs.
In its press release, the International Financial Institution explains that “The war against Ukraine has greatly reduced the country’s ability to export cereals and caused disruptions in the supply of cereals in the world, as well as the surge in world prices of commodities, which have directly affected southern and eastern Mediterranean countries, some of which are among the world’s leading cereal importers”.
The press release adds that “Tunisia imports two-thirds of its wheat needs annually”.
Since the start of its operations in Tunisia in 2012, the EBRD has invested more than €1.5 billion in 59 projects in the country, both in the private and public sectors.
The EBRD has announced that it is planning, together with the Cereals Office and the Tunisian authorities, “The development and implementation of a roadmap to improve the efficiency of the cereals sector and remedy certain structural weaknesses”.
Among the objectives of the roadmap is, among others, the implementation of an action plan prepared by experts in association with the stakeholders concerned to remedy the annual structural deficiencies of the cereals sector.
