❊ Why Do Food Prices Go Up In Ramadan?

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.