Northern Sudan’s Merowe suffers from a severe flour shortage

People living in Merowe in northern Sudan are suffering from an acute bread crisis. An independent member of the national parliament wants to summon a number of Ministers over the continuing scarcity of flour in various parts of the country.

A resident of Merowe told Radio Dabanga that people start queuing in front of the bakeries from 4 am onwards.

“There are eight bakeries in the town that are now selling very small loaves of bread, because of the flour crisis,” he said.

“The crisis is exacerbated because the people of neighbouring Nouri, El Gureir, and Tangasi are suffering from a lack of bread for several months, which prompted them to try to obtain their share of bread in Merowe.”

The source complained about the silence of the local authorities concerning the problem.

Summons

In Omdurman, independent MP Mubarak El Nour announced his intention to submit a request to summon the Ministers of Finance, Trade, Industry and Agriculture for a parliamentary hearing concerning the ongoing flour shortage in various parts of the country, including the capital Khartoum.

He said in a press statement in Khartoum on Sunday that he will request the Speaker of the Parliament, Ibrahim Ahmed Omar, to summon the four Ministers in the first week of next October for questioning about the causes of the crisis, the funds allocated for the import of flour, and possible instances of fraud by owners of bakeries, and possible solutions.

Dollar rate

Economic expert Dr Sidgi Kaballo holds Khartoum responsible for the current bread crisis in the country. It is “one of the manifestations of the suffocating economic crisis in Sudan,” he told this station last week.

“The current bread crisis seems a preparation for the public opinion to ease the upcoming increase in the price of bread, and to prepare the public to accept the policy of lifting the subsidies for flour which the government announced earlier,” he stated.

The economist denied that there are subsidies in place for flour as the price of flour in Sudan exceeds the global price, in comparison to the official price of the US dollar. According to him, “The relative stop of the exchange rate of the Dollar against the Pound in the black market at SDG21 has had serious effects on imports and remittances.”

In 2015, Sudan imported more than two million tons of wheat at a cost of $1.5 billion. The recurrent flour crises during the past few years have been attributed to the scarcity of foreign currency needed for the import of wheat.