Decrease in bread allocated to Damascus neighborhoods, despite change in distribution mechanism
Damascus – North-Press Agency
Ahmad Kanaan
For days, families in the Syrian capital Damascus have been struggling to procure bread amid a shortage of allocations distributed through accredited people, a mechanism which was decided by the Ministry of Interior as one of the government’s measures to reduce overcrowding and gatherings in the face of coronavirus.
Khadija Abdel-Karim, a mother of two children and a resident of Sahnaya in the southern countryside of Damascus, told North-Press that she had difficulty getting a bundle of bread every day.
Because of this, she is forced to buy Siyahi bread [different type of bread], of which a single bundle costs 700 Syrian pounds, “which is a large amount in comparison with my husband’s income.”
In a general announcement to its directorates last March, the Ministry of Internal Trade and Consumer Protection requested to activate the work of accredited people to distribute bread to citizens’ places of residence in order to reduce crowding in the bakeries.
Neighborhood committees calculated the needs of the citizens, where one bundle of bread was allocated for a family of three people, two bundles for a family of five, and three bundles for a family of eight people.
One of the accredited people in Jaramana neighborhood told North-Press that the current allocations do not meet the needs of the residents, as he received only 2,000 bundles of bread, while he has more than 3,000 families.
Via a telephone conversation with North-Press, Omar Sa’ad, head of Jaramana City Council, said that they were unable to meet families’ needs due to the lack of availability.
He added that this quantity will be improved by the beginning of April, noting the new steps. “The bread will be sold through the Ministry of Internal Trade centers, where a family of more than four people can get two bundles a day via a smart card.”
This comes despite the fact that the governmental team concerned to keep up with the strategy of tackling the COVID-19 epidemic, made an announcement on March 28th to grant bakeries, special mills, and all import facilities permission to import the necessary amount of wheat and flour for its work with maximum production capacity.