Why your mother and tourists are to blame for the rise of food prices during Ramadan.
Joesph Barrak/AFP
When Ramadan comes, food prices increase and people get angry.
four bunches of parsley cost LL1,000 before Ramadan, while only one bunch can be bought for the same price today. Moreover, the prices of red meat have gone up by LL2,000 and the value of one kilogram of chicken has risen by LL3,000.
What can explain these rises?
The most fashionable villains are food distributors and retailers. Those evil hoarders allegedly want to exploit people to turn a higher profit. It’s a cute theory, with bad guys et all, but it doesn’t explain the whole truth. The real baddies -drum rolls- are our mothers! (or whoever cooks for us).
You see, our mothers work on overdrive during Ramadan. They have the impossible task of preparing a feast every evening, and to make things worse, they have a deadline! So they’re short on time during the day. My mother stocks up for the entire month in one day, which means a carload of meat, chicken and vegetables in one visit to the market. Now multiply that by the amount of Muslim households and you’ll understand the shortages (and price hikes) that could take place. For those geeky readers out there: It’s like the supermarkets have been Digged.
We also tend to overdo the buying. As one woman told Now Lebanon last year:
It’s the people’s excitement… If you want one kilo of tomatoes, you go out and buy five. Now there’s a large demand for tomatoes. You bring them home, but you only eat three kilos. The other two rot and you throw them away
The only puzzling aspect of this phenomenon, is that farmers, retailers and food distributors have a lot of advanced warning of the upcoming Ramadan demand. So why don’t they produce/stock up on more items?
Part of the answer brings us back to the supermarket villain. There could be vendors out there who prefer to raise their prices than have to deal with the logistics of storing more perishable items, especially with expensive and rare electrical power in the summer season.
So maybe we should blame the tourists after all..
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Note: Posts with titles starting with an ❊ (asterisk) are my opinion posts. I used this system to separate long posts from quick links and comments.
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It’s just supply & demand innit?
Like over here in the UK, the price of stuff goes up during the weeks leading up to Christmas. (Then compare it with the prices of the same stuff during January).
Or the price of holidays during the high and low season.
And like you say, with food you’re dealing with perishables, so storing them is a major pain in the hoop and prob quite expensive. In addition to that, from watching your news, the agricultural sector has been hit hard by the hot weather.
http://youtu.be/XVxRENiWoUg (in Arabic)
So prices are going to shoot up.
On a side note, is it just me or does learning this language turn everybody into a pedant? I didn’t used to be like this you know.
Mustapha,
I believe that Ramadan moves by two weeks every year and so the blame the tourist scenario has only 2-3 years to go:-)
Steve,
Most people are not comfortable with fusha and I imagine most canot care very much about its structure. Maybe pedantry is associated with new learners only? But if you care that much about the language then you are ahead of 90 % (thats only a guess) of all residents of the Arab states. A goos statistic to support my allegation is that the average number of years of schooling for the Arab citizen is under 4. That is hardly enough the learn how to read a simple text.
Most tourist, as in arabs have left the country. They prefer to spend Ramadan in their country rather than in a hotel, etc. It is easier for them to fast in their countries as aircos,electricity and generators are not an issue.
Over the last week I have been trying to buy a bunch of zaatar. I live in Dora now, or as I like to call it, the Republic of Armenia, and there are absolutely no signs of Ramadan there, we can not even hear any mosque to know when to break our fast. And yet, after a lot of frustrations, one of the shopkeepers in our area told @dashkoun that no one is buying zaatar because now a bunch costs 2,000 ( usually 12 cost that much) and they prefer not to buy any rather than let their customers think they’re being ripped off.
Then I decided to search in big supermakrets, BHV, Coop, TSC… and there too to no avail I could find no zaatar. I could only see crazy people buying their way out of the store as if preparing to hide in a bomb shelter for the next 10 years, snatching goods of each other before they run out. It was scary.