06 November 2010
BEIRUT: Madame Latifeh waits quietly as a butcher in the Zkak Blat neighborhood of Beirut wraps her parcel of minced meat for the week.
“I have to invent new dishes for my kids,” says Latifeh, whose frail 150-centimeter frame bears the weight of her grocery shopping, a nine-hour day at her job in the city’s outskirts, and the notion of a seemingly endless rise in meat prices.
Latifeh struggles to come up with new ways to satisfy both the culinary cravings and economic well-being of her family.
“Families are doing away with the lunch table Sundays,” Latifeh’s butcher says, “rather than put together a proper meal – like kussa and grape leaves or bazella – people are settling for a more casual get together over lahm b’aajeen sandwiches. It’s more affordable.”
Most Lebanese families have drifted along the unrelenting tide of rising food prices over the last few years, with little discernible change to their grocery spending habits.
However, the spike in beef prices to nearly LL 24,000 a kilo over the last three weeks has generated uproar from the Agriculture Ministry that has reverberated across various neighborhoods, and notably a leading non-profit consumer protection association, Consumers Lebanon.
The consumer protection association reports that import prices at Beirut’s port “totaled in the month of August, $2,745 per ton, meaning that livestock traders have bought, in October, the live cows at a price that is lower than that of the month of August by 1 percent.”
They said that they had gathered their statistics from the administration of Beirut Port.
“The figures of the European Union Commission show that the prices of live cows between June 2010 and today have fallen by a total of 6.5 percent,” Consumers Lebanon declared.
Why then, asks the association, have consumers racked up increasingly large bills over red meat?
The Agriculture Ministry, Consumers Lebanon, and several disgruntled butchers blame this phenomenon on livestock cartels.
In Lebanon, which is a large net importer of red meat at nearly 95 percent, the livestock trade is dominated by six commercial groups, and it has been alleged that these traders manipulated supplies in order to generate exceedingly wide profit margins.
“Some traders went to Turkish markets in order to achieve greater profits by tipping the balance between demand and supply,” Agriculture Minister Hussein Hajj Hassan said at a news conference which was held with the Union for Livestock Trade in Lebanon Thursday, “So [prices] have risen by a high margin when it should have not risen by more than 10 percent.”
Hajj Hassan said that price hikes have been aided by external factors, namely global droughts that brought on a surge in international meat prices in September, but gave assurances that prices should range between LL12,000 and LL15,000, and not the LL15,000 to LL24,000 price bracket that they have risen to in recent weeks.
Last week, spurred on by the Agriculture Ministry, the economy minister drafted a law that would restrict traders’ profit margins to 20 percent. The move was greeted with a potent mixture of skepticism, outrage and praise.
The Livestock Traders Union dismissed the move as anti-competitive and said figures released by Lebanon Consumers were false.
“[Lebanon’s meat prices] are close to those of every European nation that we import from, and the same goes for Brazil,” head of the Union for Livestock Traders Ma’arouf Bekdache told the daily An-Nahar Thursday. He wanted to remind Lebanese consumers that red meat prices in the country remain below those of neighboring countries.
Most of the butchers that The Daily Star spoke to in Beirut lauded the new law, saying that business would benefit greatly from a fall in prices. Some butcher shops reported a 60 percent fall in receipts, with most regular customers cutting their meat consumption in half in order to make ends meet.
“It would be great if the ministry could apply the law, but how are they going to do this? I don’t know,” one butcher in the Hamra area said.
The sentiments were echoed by Rami Zurayk, associate dean in the faculty of food sciences at the American University of Beirut, who was twice adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture. “I’m impressed by the fact that [the Agriculture Minister] is trying, and he’s trying it with the Economy and Trade Ministry,” Zurayk told The Daily Star on efforts to tighten traders’ profit margins.
Asked what would get in the way of the law’s implementation, Zurayk, who views the historical marriage between the Lebanese state and big merchants as a root of the country’s economic problems, said “the logistics” of a convoluted market would make it difficult to maneuver. “There is nothing right in everything you get, with every single piece of paper that a trader gets in Lebanon there’s a possibility that it’s falsified … so I don’t know what mechanisms he’s going to be using in order to implement this,” said Zurayk.
Copyright The Daily Star 2010.
