According to the High Commission for Planning (HCP), inflation reached a peak of 8.3 % at the end of 2022, with an increase of 15 % of food prices.
By Aurélie COLLAS (Casablanca, Correspondence)
It is 10 hours spent. The merchants have unpacked their goods on the souk stalls of Derb Ghallef, a popular district of Casablanca, but customers are slow to flock. Mina Brima, in his fifties, wanders in the middle of poultry stalls and vegetable carts, the empty basket. “Everything has become too expensive, is sorry this resident of the neighborhood. Tomatoes, potatoes, eggs … everything! If it continues, it will be famine!”
What worries Mina is this outbreak of prices that has redoubled intensity in recent weeks in Morocco and forces it to severe rationing. She no longer eats meat, restricts her tagines to a few pieces of potatoes, when her meals are not limited, more and more often, to bread and tea. A few alleys further, Jamila, 45 years old and three mouths to feed, leave the souk a sachet of flour in hand: “That is to make my bread, she said. For vegetables, I will come back tonight. “The unsold are cheaper.
“Before, customers bought per pounds. Now they leave with three tomatoes, two onions …”, laments Hamza Akharchaf. The premiere recognizes that “prices, at the moment, is the ultimate”. “I have nothing below five dirhams,” he said. Same observation at Taoufik, the butcher of the neighboring alley, whose pieces of meat hanging at the hooks of its storefront borders on 100 dirhams per kilo: “In thirty-six years of business, I had never experienced three-digit prices ! “Consequently, he also sells three times less.
Call for mobilization
According to the High Commission for Planning (HCP), inflation reached a peak of 8.3 % at the end of 2022, with a 2 % increase in food prices. In a country where the level of poverty and social inequalities have continued to worsen since the health crisis, this surge in prices, against the backdrop of the prices of raw materials coupled with a serious drought, crystallizes tensions. Sunday, February 19, sit-in was organized in several cities of the kingdom, at the call of the Democratic Labor Confederation (CDT), one of the three most representative union centers.
despite the prohibition to demonstrate decreed by the authorities – justified by the state of health emergency still in force in Morocco -, the union maintained its call to the mobilization. Objective: “protesting the unprecedented increase in prices and denounce the government’s indifference to the worsening of the social crisis”, explains Younès Firachine, member of the CDT executive office, believing that the authorities “have not Taken of concrete arrangements to preserve the purchasing power of Moroccans who keeps collapsing “.
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