DAKAR (AFP) — The world food crisis, with rising prices causing shortages, riots and hunger -- often for those already struggling to feed themselves -- has brutally exposed Senegal's Achilles' heel: it imports the majority of its needs.
This has left the west African state particularly at risk as it struggles to keep prices under control while setting up a vast programme to stimulate food self-sufficiency.
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade has announced a string of anti-price-hike measures and even an emergency deal with India to feed his country for the next six years.
But in the short term, locals grumble they can no longer afford to buy sufficient food.
"It said on the radio that rice was 280 CFA francs (42 euro cents, 65 US cents) a kilo, but the shopkeepers are demanding 300 CFA francs ... it's too expensive, it's untenable," complained a housewife after an angry argument with a shop owner in north of Dakar.
"There is rice, but we must pay for it. It's expensive for us as well," the shopkeeper riposted. The World Bank estimates that in the last three years, global food prices have practically doubled.
Importers say there are some 200,000 tonnes of rice piled up in the warehouses around the capital Dakar, but they refuse to sell because the government has not yet paid out subsidies it promised.
Under the deal with India, the Asian economic giant would provide 600,000 tonnes of rice a year for six years giving Senegal time to "undergo an agricultural revolution" and develop its own harvests of rice, wheat, cassava and corn. It is not known when the deal will take effect.
This month, Dakar announced a blanket offer of tax breaks for all agricultural investors in a further effort to boost its own crops.
Faced with rocketing rice prices around the world, the government first suspended customs tariffs on rice, then on April 12 announced a subsidy for rice imports (entirely from Asia) which dominate the Senegalese market: 2,000 CFA francs (three euros, 4.6 dollars) a tonne for the importer, 5,000 CFA francs for the wholesaler and 15 CFA francs for the retailer.
But since the biggest Asian exporters (India and Vietnam, for example) have either reduced or suspended their export sales in order to satisfy domestic demand, the price just keeps on rising.
Despite that, Senegal has stockpiled enough rice to last "approximately four months", according to Moustapha Tall, one of the country's biggest importers, who claims to have about 25 percent of the national market for rice.
"Today, there are about 200,000 tonnes of rice at our disposal," among all importers, or in other words about a third of the annual national consumption, Tall added. He buys mostly broken aromatic rice from Thailand and stores it in open-air depots at Mbao, a dozen kilometres (nine miles) north of Dakar.
But these stocks remain out of reach for a large portion of the population, whose paltry purchasing power has been engulfed by the recent price hikes.
The country recently saw its first price demonstrations against the escalating costs of basic foodstuffs, where the majority of the population survive on less than one euro a day.
"If things continue like this, we'll have to eat sand!", griped Bouya, a taxi driver, listening to the umpteeneth radio debate on the subject in his cab.
According to the National Agency for Statistic sand Demographics (ANSD), the rise in consumer prices in 2007 was the most significant since the economic slowdown recorded in the aftermath of the 50 percent devaluation of the CFA Franc in 1994.
The rate of inflation has also spiralled upwards, from 2.7 percent in 2006 to 5.9 percent last year.
"In Senegal, food prices are 24 percent above the average for Africa, and are the highest" in the region, apart from Nigeria and Cape Verde, confirmed the World Bank's official in Dakar, Madani Tall, in the quarterly publication of the bank, published last month.
In addition, measures to subsidise rice at a "social price" will not be sustainable in the long run under the government's budget, say economists.
"The problem is to hold on until the next harvest. The government must review its agricultural policy," warned Tall, not just in order to produce more and of a better quality, but also to create better market conditions.
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