WUNRN
Palestine-Gaza: High
Food Prices & Food Shortage - Hunger - Poverty
By Erin Cunningham
GAZA CITY, May 13 (IPS) - Um Abdullah cannot remember the
last time she was able to feed meat to her eight children. She does know that
for the past week the single meal she cooked for them each day consisted only
of lentils. And that on one day, she had received aid coupons from the United
Nations, which she subsequently sold to buy tomatoes and eggplant at the local
market.
Um Abdullah is a 42-year-old dressmaker and hails from
Jabaliya, a cramped refugee camp on the outskirts of Gaza City. Stories like
hers are commonplace across the Gaza Strip, where years of sanctions, siege and
now war have battered the territory's economy and put many essentials out of
reach for the majority of the population.
"We live day to day, nothing more," says Um
Abdullah, who made less than three dollars in profit over the last three days.
"If we can eat once a day, that is good enough for us."
While the prices of food and other goods have cooled off
from the record highs they hit during Israel's three-week assault, the World
Food Programme (WFP) reports that a number of items, many of them basic, remain
more expensive for Gaza's residents than they were before Operation Cast Lead.
Sugar, rice, onion, cucumber, tomato, lemon, pepper,
chicken, meat, fish and garlic were all more expensive for Gaza's residents in
March 2009 than they were in December 2008, the WFP says.
The price of pepper per kilogram doubled, while the cost of
onions jumped 33 percent. Fresh chicken is now 43 percent more expensive than
before the war, a result of the destruction of a number of poultry farms across
Gaza throughout the assault.
The decimation of wide swathes of agricultural land, as well
as cattle and sheep farms, has added to Gaza's growing food insecurity.
But the war only intensified an already dire humanitarian
situation, economists say, which has its roots in Israel's economic siege that
hermetically sealed Gaza's borders in June 2007.
The shortage of all but "essential" goods and a
flow of only a trickle of fuel have sent prices of food and other products
skyrocketing over the past two years, making them unaffordable to many
households in the Gaza Strip.
According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the food
portion of Gaza's consumer price index (CPI) - an economic indicator used to
measure the average price of goods and services purchased by households - rose
28 percent in 2008.
In Israel, by comparison, the CPI's food segment increased
by less than 5 percent from March 2008 to March 2009, Israel's Central Bureau
of Statistics reports.
"A negative economic growth rate coupled with an
extreme shortage of goods is causing what we call stagflation in Gaza and that
is what is behind the high prices," says Dr. Ibrahim Hantash of the
Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute.
"The rampant smuggling also sends prices of basic goods
through the roof, because there is no control. It's all black market."
After the war, the majority of Gazans are now living below
the income poverty line, says the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
It defines the line as a family of six subsisting on 500 dollars per month.
More than half of those families living below the poverty
are living in extreme hardship, on less than 250 dollars each month, or approximately
1.35 dollars per person per day.
And because Gaza's households spend most of their dwindling
monthly income on food, the IMF says, 75 percent of the population has been
forced to reduce the quantity of food they buy, while 89 percent reduced the
quality.
This has meant many households, like Um Abdullah's, have had
to forego certain sources of protein, including meat and eggs.
"Gazans face an acute shortage of nutritious,
locally-produced and affordable food," says a report released by the WFP
and the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) in March.
Gazans have consequently reduced their daily calorie intake,
mainly by no longer eating items like red meat, rice, oils and fats, and fruits
and dairy products – leading to nutritional deficiencies like anaemia, the
report says.
Jalal Ataf Al-Masari has been running a fruit stand at the
heart of the crowded Beach refugee camp in Gaza City for ten years, and he says
he has never seen prices so high and business so low.
"At the beginning of the siege, it was only the poor
that stopped buying fruit," Al-Masari says. "Now, nobody buys fruit.
Life has become increasingly worse."
One kilo of bananas at Al-Masari's shop is six shekels, or
1.45 dollars. Apples, imported from Israel, are five shekels, or 1.20 dollars
per kilo. Before the siege, Al-Masari says, you could buy three kilos of apples
for 10 shekels, or 2.42 dollars.
Now, not even pears, peaches or kiwis are available in the
market. Many of Gaza's "supermarkets" contain sparsely stocked
shelves of UN-distributed rice, EU-donated cooking oil, some canned goods and
plastic bags of flour, salt and lentils.
"I have been dealing with this siege for two years and
I still can't believe how expensive everything is," Al-Masari says.
"It's more expensive than America."
The WFP says Gaza's residents are resorting to certain
"coping mechanisms" to keep their families afloat, including selling
jewellery or property, buying food on credit, and borrowing from friends and
family.
Soha Kaloub, mother of eight and wife of a civil policeman
whose salary has been cut off by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah,
says from her bare home in the Beach refugee camp that they were forced to sell
off all their furniture in order to buy food.
Kaloub cannot afford to fill her six-kilogram canister of
cooking gas, which would cost her about six dollars, so she uses a small
kerosene cooker left over from the era of the Ottoman rule in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries.
She uses it to cook beans or lentils, sometimes vegetables,
for her children. "For nine months, we haven't had meat or chicken. My
refrigerator is empty, our lives our empty," Kaloub says. "It wasn't
paradise before the siege, but it was better. At least we had something."
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