“When the shortages started, we started using less sugar and coffee in our pastries, but we can’t do without butter,” explains Ms. Kamoun, CEO of Gourmandise, a brand that has 26 shops in Tunisia and employs more than 600 people.
To make its cakes, the company normally needs three tons of sugar per week, four tons of butter, and between seven and eight tons of flour, all products that have become very difficult to obtain in recent months in a country hit by a serious financial crisis and political tensions.
Tunisian President Kais Saied has promised to crack down on the “speculators” to whom he attributes these shortages, the situation has not improved. Often, when a product that was missing reappears on the shelves, others disappear. In recent days, coffee, milk and sugar are either not found in stores or sold in very small quantities. And when the customer doesn’t find it, the food industry also suffers.
“Monopolies”
“At our level, we can’t do anything, we can’t import sugar, coffee or flour because these are state monopolies,” explains Ms. Kamoun. On the other hand, Gourmandise has had to raise its prices twice since the beginning of the year in the face of the increase in the cost of raw materials, she underlines.
For several weeks, in the suburb of Ben Arous south of Tunis, a line of vans has formed every day in front of the factory of the Tunisian Beverage Manufacturing Company (SFBT), which bottles Coca-Cola and Boga in particular. , 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. The factory, which employs some 600 workers, put dozens on technical unemployment for a few days in August before reinstating them after protests.
“We began to feel this problem at the end of June with a great lack of quantities (of sugar) made available to us by the Trade Office”, explains Souheil Boukhris, union representative of the factory. “We only hear promises. Coming soon. It’s for tomorrow, the day after tomorrow etc. I can tell you that this situation and these promises we have been hearing since June, ”he adds.
“Hide the Problems”
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 to “the financial problems” of the Tunisian state and its low foreign exchange reserves.
“The discourse of the executive in Tunisia is not objective. He wants to hide the problems by talking about speculation. Obviously, the main problem is not speculation in Tunisia. The big problem is the inability of public finances to continue playing the role of the welfare state,” he says.
Abundant in the same direction, the professor of economy Reda Shekandali judges the speech of president Saied, throwing the whole responsibility on the speculators, “fixed and unreasonable”. “Speculation would not be possible if the state made sufficient quantities of basic products available”.
Tunisia is in negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a loan of around two billion dollars to deal with its serious financial crisis, which has worsened since President Saied seized full power in July 2021. But the powerful UGTT trade union center rejected the reforms demanded by the IMF.