Law absence affects price stability in Syria, civil activist
QANISHLI, Syria (North Press) – The absence of the catering control in Syria causes the instability in foodstuff prices, especially since this has not been accompanied by a salary increase by the government, Nader Fattoum, a civil activist from Salamiya in Hama eastern countryside, told North Press on Saturday.
“There is a dialectical relationship between the cost of the production and the determined profit, bearing in mind supply and demand,” Fattoum added.
In light of the absence of law, the prices of the materials exceed the supply and demand and become hard to control under the effect of many hidden and unhidden factors, according to Fattoum.
Fattoum pointed out that the farmers used to deal with the crops with some simplicity “to give a good and acceptable product with little available organic fertilizer. Accordingly, the pricing was locally acceptable.”
However, in the absence of poor agricultural planning, “the municipal genetic seeds were withdrawn and were replaced by imported varieties with elegant packaging, to be put on the agricultural market.”
“Thus, the suffering began to show its results, but it was too late,” Fattoum stated.
“The imported seeds have conditions to produce, they need imported fertilizers and pesticides, and these are sold at international prices as they are subject to foreign currency, but they are sold in the local markets in local currency.”
The absence of the law comes in light of the infrastructure destruction, the electricity cut, the loss of fuel, the spread of the black market, in addition to bribes, smuggling and the pricing of the traffic tax, according to Fattoum.
“The catering system is unable to control anything. Things go under the banner that ‘it is a state of war’ and its repercussions on society, but war is not everything, rather it is a complement to a long-buried crisis,” he noted.
A new wave of high prices is sweeping across the Syrian local markets, coinciding with the devaluation of the Syrian Pound against other foreign currencies, which causes instability in the prices of food and supplies.