Photos of empty supermarket shelves, published on the Web, show the extent of food shortages in Tunisia. According to the information site Réalités, the production of yogurt, biscuits, soft drinks and fruit juices would be suspended in several industrial areas of the country from this Thursday, September 8, 2022. Reason: shortage of sugar.
“Without flour, sugar or butter, we cannot work”, confirms to AFP Radhia Kamoun, CEO of Gourmandise, a brand which has 26 shops in Tunisia and employs more than 600 people. “When the shortages started, we started using less sugar and coffee in our pastries, but we can’t do without butter,” she explains.
According to the local press, to deal with the shortage of sugar in an emergency, Tunisia turned to its Algerian neighbor to import 20,000 tonnes. However, according to Réalités, which cites economic sources, the delivery which was to arrive on Wednesday, September 7, by land, has not yet been received. This shortage, which dates back to the beginning of the summer, is seriously affecting all sectors.
For several weeks, in the suburb of Ben Arous to the south of the capital Tunis, a line of vans has formed every day in front of the factory of the Tunisian Beverage Manufacturing Company (SFBT), which notably bottles Coca-Cola and the Boga, the national soda. Due to a lack of sufficient quantities of sugar, the factory is idling and the distribution vans have to wait for hours to load the crates of soft drinks. “We started to feel this problem at the end of June with a great lack of quantities (sugar) made available to us by the Office of Commerce”, explains to AFP Souheil Boukhris, union representative of the factory.
Social Affairs Minister Malek Zahi acknowledged in late August that the country was facing shortages, blaming them on “disruptions to supply chains and rising global prices and transport costs”, in the context of the war in Ukraine. But the Tunisian economic expert Moez Hadidane believes that the crisis is mainly due “financial problems” of the Tunisian state and its low foreign exchange reserves. The level of the latter no longer allows Tunisia to play the welfare state according to economists.
“The ships loaded with cereals were indeed in Tunisian ports except that they were unable to unload their cargoes because the office was in financial difficulty”, testifies Alexandre Arrobbio, representative of the World Bank in Tunisia, quoted by the TAP agency. For the World Bank, the grain subsidy system has reached a “point of no return”. She recommends a reform targeting low-income households rather than price subsidies.
Tunisia is in negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a loan of around two billion dollars to deal with its severe financial crisis, which has worsened since President Saied seized full power in July. 2021.