According to officials, prices should drop by the end of May.
Over the past two weeks, the price of potatoes in Algeria tripled from 40 to 120 dinars as snow coverage has affected crops and speculators have exploited the situation.
"The price of potatoes has never reached these heights before. We were used to seeing cyclical increases of 20 to 30 dinars (per kilo), but then prices would come down again after a few days. This rise has continued and it's beyond all comprehension," said Makhlouf, a public-sector worker with two children.
Average annual prices went from 50 dinars per kilo in 2007 to 35 dinars in 2008, 43 dinars in 2009, 36 dinars in 2010 and 39 dinars in 2011.
The agriculture ministry explained that the weather "pushed the end-of-season harvest back by 40 days".
"This rise is continuing because the harvest hasn't fully begun yet. This has been factored into the price of the product by some producers who supply the market with small quantities before the harvest begins in earnest," the ministry claimed.
The total area sown at the end of the 2010-11 season is the same as that sown in the previous season, 55,000 hectares, of which nearly 5,000 hectares were reserved for early produce.
Hadj Ladjali, the president of the Chamber of Agriculture in the province of Ain Defla, which is one of the country's main potato-growing areas along with Mostaganem, Mascara and El Oued, said that speculators have exploited the bad weather to keep prices high.
"The current rises in the prices of potatoes, which are one of the most widely consumed agricultural products in Algeria, is due to speculation during a lean period between the end of the late autumn harvest and this season's harvest, which takes place from mid-April to mid-June," he said.
"Now we're in a slack period, with a big imbalance in the market due to the absence of the early crop from Mostaganem, where the crop growth cycle was greatly delayed by the bad weather in February," he added.
To make matters worse, a strike is being waged by wholesalers in Bougara (Algiers region) and another has been announced by wholesalers in Boufarik (south of Algiers), who are protesting the fact that unlicensed potato vendors have set up shop at market entrances. The rise in potato prices has also caused the prices of tomatoes, peas and sweet peppers to increase.
However, the trend should reverse at the end of this month according to the spokesman of the General Union of Algerian Traders and Artisans (UGCAA), Hadj Tahar Boulenouar, who said at the beginning of this week that potato prices will fall by 40 per cent because "large quantities of potatoes from the regions of Mostaganem, Relizane, Ain Defla and the coast will begin to be collected from the end of this month onwards and then put on sale."
He added that efforts are being made to "organise distribution, stabilise prices and protect people's purchasing power" and blamed the sudden price rise on a "production shortfall due to the recent bad weather which affected the quantity and quality of harvests."
Agriculture Minister Rachid Benaissa said that importing potatoes would not counteract the price rises, and worse still, there was "a risk that it will affect the whole industry".
As he explained to journalists, studies have shown that the price of imported potatoes would be somewhere between 70 and 75 dinars per kilo.
"This price is not competitive enough to beat the market price, and what's more, imported potatoes are of lower quality because they have been stored for six months," the minister said.
"Quantities of potatoes are coming onto the market every day and prices should get back to normal by the end of May when the harvest reaches its seasonal peak," Benaissa concluded.
© Magharebia.com 2012
