Complaints about rapidly rising prices, lack of medicines in Sudan

Many Sudanese are suffering from rising prices of food and medicines. A number of medicines have become hard to find or are not available at all.

Listeners told Radio Dabanga from Halfa El Jadeeda in eastern Sudan’s Kassala that the price for a kilogram of lamb meat jumped from DSDG 300 ($7*) to SDG 400 last week. The price for a kilogram of beef rose from SDG 180 to SDG 280. Adding a salad to the meal now costs SDG 100 ($2.20) instead of SDG 30.

In El Geneina, capital of West Darfur, the price of a gallon of benzine rose to SDG 180 and a gallon of diesel SDG 150.

Various people in the city lamented the high food costs. “We now pay SDG 2,200 ($49) for a 100kg sack of sorghum,” one of them said.

Shortages of medicines were reported in the five states of Darfur and in North and West Kordofan. Pharmacists confirmed that a variety of medicines are not on the markets anymore.

They complained about a lack of life-saving medicines, medications for psychiatric and neurological patients, and fever drops for new-borns.

“Many people come to the pharmacy with prescriptions but return to the hospital or home empty-handed because the medicines are not available anymore or they cannot afford to pay for them,” a pharmacist reported from El Fula in West Kordofan.

Already in September 2018, Radio Dabanga reported that Sudanese in various parts of the country were having difficulty in coping with the continuously rising food and consumer goods prices. A number of families complained that the circumstances forced them to reduce their daily meals to just one.

* As foreign exchange rates can vary in Sudan, Radio Dabanga bases all SDG currency conversions on the daily US dollar rate quoted by the Central Bank of Sudan (CBoS)

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