“If a grocery owner comes here for cooking oil and finds it, he’ll automatically buy pasta, tomatoes, couscous and other products,” says the married father-of-three. Another growing worry is the number of customers who pay on credit, he tells us, as he waves a thick wad of handwritten IOU chits. We need to be able to work to feed our kids.”Įchoing that message, wholesaler Walid Khalfawi’s main headache is the lack of available cooking oil, as his bare storerooms indicate. “When a client comes, he can’t get all the basics. “We are working at half capacity,” says Samia Zwabi, who reels off a wishlist that includes milk, sugar, cooking oil and fruit juice. Like many parents, the fact that it’s the start of the school year is an additional concern. She explains to UN News that she has to borrow money or buy goods on credit for her grocery store, assuming she can find them in the first place. ‘It’s like hunting without bullets’Īt a wholesaler’s outlet in Mornag, a town on the outskirts of Tunis, customer Samia Zwabi knows all about the shortages and rising prices. Redissi Radhouane is the chief mill operator at La Compagnie Tunisienne de Semoulerie flour mill in Tunis, Tunisia. “When we look for the wheat, we don’t find any. “Now, we are not in crisis, the crisis is always happening,” says Redissi Radhouane, the chief mill operator at La Compagnie Tunisienne de Semoulerie. The scene is industrious, but the mill is not nearly as busy as it should be, thanks in no small part to the impact of the Ukraine conflict on cutting grain exports from Black Sea, and its role in accentuating existing economic uncertainty. Spreading the loadĪt an enormous mill in the Tunisian capital, there’s an abundance of flour, as workers stand under a conveyor belt which transports an apparently endless supply of semolina, packaged up into large, heavy-duty plastic sacks.Īs the bags start to fall, the men grab them in turns and load them into a large flat-bed lorry until it is full, their faces covered in fine white flour. Since 1 August, 240 vessels have sailed from Ukrainian ports with some 5.4 million metric tons of grain and other foodstuffs. The agreement was described as a “beacon of hope” by UN Secretary-General António Guterres at the signing ceremony for the Black Sea Grain Initiative on 27 July in Istanbul, with representatives from Russian and Ukraine. “I think what the crisis in Ukraine has brought up again, is the hard choices that people have to make on a daily basis, because people forced to flee their homes, people forced to flee their country, are not taking that decision lightly,” says Safa Msehli, spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration ( IOM).įor many Tunisians, it remains a challenge to source basic staples, although more than 85,000 metric tonnes of Ukrainian wheat have arrived in Tunisian ports in the two months since the Black Sea Grain Initiative kicked into action, its Joint Coordination Centre in Odesa, said on Thursday. In Tunis, Tunisia, a local newspaper says that there will be a sugar delivery soon in the country. FRUITJUICE PRESS TVThis is despite the fact that many thousands of people have died trying to cross the Central Mediterranean Sea from North African nations to Europe on unsafe boats in recent years, and regular TV news reports that announce yet another missing person - or family - at sea. “Please, make it easier for us to migrate across the sea, so we can leave,” he says.Īlthough the elderly customer scoffs at the idea – “He wants to drown! He wants to drown!” – for many younger Tunisians, leaving the country in search of work and security is a frequent topic of conversation. Nodding his head in agreement, the stallholder takes her money and makes an astonishing, if discreet, appeal. It is like the world is on fire,” another woman explains, as she opens her purse to pay for a bagful of tomatoes, jumbled together on a wooden cart by the side of the road. “The prices are going up! Poor people can no longer afford anything. “There is no sugar, I have to take a taxi very far away to buy one kilogramme of sugar,” one woman explains in frustration, at a market in Kairouan, a town several hours drive south of the capital, Tunis.
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