Screams are heard from the small bakery Baydoun in Beirut. A customer is angry that he was only given two bags of bread. “Give me another bag,” shouts 65-year-old Joseph Chalhoub. ‘I have two families to support!’ The corner of his mouth quivers as he steps out of the shop. He and his children have been without bread for two days.
In Lebanon, no one is surprised anymore, now that bread is rapidly becoming a scarce commodity. Many bakeries have closed their doors, and there are long lines at other establishments. The common explanation is: Russia invaded Ukraine and because both countries are major grain exporters, the global wheat price went through the roof. Since then, the supply to countries in the Arab world has stalled. But Chalhoub sees things differently and he is far from the only one at the bakery. “This propaganda is artificially created so that the government can drive up prices. They are all liars, and everyone makes a profit, including the flour mills and the bakeries.’
Wait twenty days
More on the debt question later. It has been established that the shop owners, father and son Shouman, have been waiting for a new shipment of flour for twenty days. They hang out at the factory every day. ‘We always hear: tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow’, says Ali Shouman (25) shaking his head.
There are enough baguettes, croissants and sweets in the store, no wheat flour goes through them. It is very different with the nutritious flat breads, a kind of XXL pita. Lebanese use them as edible cutlery: you tear them into strips and dip them in hummus or olive oil. For a subsidized price of 50 euro cents you can get a bag with six flat breads in the bakery.
At the beginning of this week, father and son made a drastic decision: each family will receive a maximum of two bags. No one is favored, even now that it is Ramadan and many people want to stock up for iftar. And if you come back an hour later for an extra bag? No chance, grins head salesman Sadiq al-Nahas (21). “I recognize all the faces.” Yet a man walks out a little later with a third bag. “For someone else,” he mumbles before quickly leaving the bakery.
Lepe middlemen
Surprisingly enough, nobody in the bakery talks about the catastrophic Russian-Ukrainian war. Nobody blames President Putin, nobody mentions shocks in the world market. Lebanese have been stuck in a severe economic crisis for two years, and have gradually become accustomed to scarcity. Medicines, electricity, cooking oil, sugar, petrol, there is a shortage of almost everything. The old rule of thumb that big money can be made in times of scarcity applies every day. Last summer there were queues at the gas stations for hours: not because the petrol had run out, but because clever middlemen saved up stock and artificially inflated the price.
Something similar has happened to bread since the war broke out in Ukraine, said Rami Zurayk, a professor of food security at the American University of Beirut. ‘Just to clear up a misunderstanding: there is still enough wheat on the world market, thanks to a good harvest in 2021. The supply is not the problem. The problem is the high price, combined with Lebanon’s lack of foreign exchange, or dollars, with which people import goods.’
Fishing for a favorable exchange rate
The result: permanent pressure on importers, who are all fishing for a favorable exchange rate at the Central Bank. Corruption is lurking. There are ten to fifteen days between mooring a ship with wheat and baking a flatbread with that wheat, Zurayk explains. In it, the quality is checked and the paperwork is done. Many parties can delay the case in order to drive up the price and gain wider margins, out of sight of ordinary citizens. “It’s like driving past an accident with two cars colliding with each other. You see the damage, but you don’t know who caused the accident.’
On Tuesday, Lebanese could breathe a sigh of relief when Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s cabinet announced that an emergency fund from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had released 14 million euros to import wheat. It is a plaster, not a structural solution. The subsidies for flat bread may also be cut, although that will not be until after the parliamentary elections at the earliest, in mid-May: no one wants to sign for such an unpopular measure now.
More flour for a week
‘Eventually everything will run out here’, says a female customer who does not want her name in the newspaper. ‘At home I always made quiches and date biscuits, but that has not been possible for two months now. Soon we will have to ask friends to bring us flour from abroad. With a bow around it, like a box of chocolates.’
Behind her, the power went out in the bakery. The family business has weathered all storms over the past sixty years, including the bloody Lebanese civil war. Now father and son Shouman say they have flour for about a week. And after that? ‘We eat, we drink, we thank God’, says Hussein Shouman (70) stubbornly. He doesn’t give up that easily.