IRAQ: Food prices rise after reduction of monthly rations

[Rose Siding]

BAGHDAD, 2 April (IRIN) - The price of some staple food has increased in Iraq after the Ministry of Trade announced last week that several items provided by a monthly food-ration programme would be cancelled. This prompted shopkeepers to raise the cost of items which are being imported at a high price.

"Many products offered for years by the monthly food-ration programme have been taken out," said Omar Abdel Kareem, an economist at Baghdad University. "Consequently, prices have risen".

Some products have seen their prices increase by as much as 300 percent or more.....

According to officials at the trade ministry, which is largely responsible for food distribution, the cut in rations is a direct result of a 25-percent, government-imposed reduction of the annual budget. In an effort to curtail state spending on subsidies and develop a free market economy, the national budget was reduced from US $4 billion to US $3 billion for the current fiscal year.

Despite these reductions, scheduled to take effect this month, the trade ministry will continue supplying families with four essential items, including sugar, rice, flour and cooking oil. This is in contrast with 12 items provided during the reign of Saddam Hussein.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/70d87bb34defdec8eb971bfc2186d597.htm

[LynnTheDem]

1. PROGRESS in making things WORSE NOW than under Hussein...CONGRATS, bUSH!

bush; stupidest MFer ever.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

2. And we still keep telling them they are better off now

think they believe us yet?

"While Hamza went on to predict that retail prices on essential foodstuffs could be expected to stabilise again quickly, many local residents who have come to depend on monthly rations expressed desperation. "My family depends on food rations," said Muhammad Wissam, a Baghdad resident and father of four. "I earn US $50 a month as a painter, but our rent alone is $42."

According to Abdel Kareem, the budget cuts are aggravating an already difficult situation. "Before this decision, prices on items such as vegetables and grains had already doubled in January," he said. "Since then, they've increased more than 20 percent a week."

Families have relied on government-subsidised ration programmes ever since the application of United Nations-imposed sanctions on Iraq in 1991. Nearly 26.5 million of the country's 28 million people depend on monthly food rations, according to trade ministry figures."

[Viva_La_Revolution]

3. As John Tierney wrote in the New York Times on October 12, 2003

To Saddam Hussein, a culture of dependency was not a social problem but a political plus. Father Saddam, as he liked to be called, provided citizens with subsidized homes, cheap energy and, most important, free food. After international sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, he started a program that now uses 300 government warehouses and more than 60,000 workers to deliver a billion pounds of groceries every month — a basket of rations guaranteed to every citizen, rich or poor.
American and Iraqi authorities are now struggling to get out of the grocery-delivery business without letting anyone go hungry.

Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran observed before the war,

The handouts have kept food on the table for … most … Iraqi families, who can no longer afford to purchase wheat, rice and other staples at market prices because of debilitating U.N. economic sanctions imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Chandrasekaran continued:

The ration program is regarded by the United Nations as the largest and most efficient food-distribution system of its kind in the world. It has also become what is perhaps Hussein’s most strategic tool to maintain popular support over the last decade.
The United States and other Western nations had hoped the sanctions, which devastated Iraq’s once-prosperous economy, would lead Iraqis to rebel against their leader or, at the least, compel him to fully cooperate with U.N. inspectors hunting for weapons of mass destruction. But Hussein has held firm in large part by using food to stem discontent with the pain of sanctions, employing a massive network of trucks, computers, warehouses and neighborhood distributors to provide basic sustenance for every Iraqi.

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0401b.asp