It’s past 10 o’clock. Traders have unpacked their wares on the stalls of the souk in Derb Ghallef, a popular district of Casablanca, but customers are slow to arrive. Mina Brima, in her fifties, strolls among the poultry stalls and vegetable carts, her basket empty. “Everything has become too expensive, laments this resident of the neighborhood. Tomatoes, potatoes, eggs…everything! If this continues, it will be famine! »
What worries Mina is this soaring price which has redoubled in intensity in recent weeks in Morocco and forced her into severe rationing. She no longer eats meat, restricts her tajines to a few pieces of potato, 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, leaves the souk with a bag of flour in her hand: “That’s to make my bread, she says. For vegetables, I will come back tonight. » Unsold items are cheaper.
“Before, customers bought by the kilo. Now they are leaving with three tomatoes, two onions…”, laments Hamza Akharchaf. The primer recognizes that “the prices, at the moment, are the pinnacle”. “I have nothing below five dirhams”, he says. Same observation at Taoufik, the butcher in the neighboring alley, whose pieces of meat hanging from the hooks of his storefront are close to 100 dirhams per kilo: “In thirty-six years in the business, I had never experienced three-digit prices! » Consequently, it also sells three times less.
Call for mobilization
According to the High Commission for Planning (HCP), inflation peaked at 8.3% at the end of 2022, with a 15% 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 a backdrop of a rebound in commodity prices coupled with a severe drought, crystallizes tensions. Sunday, February 19, sit-ins were organized in several cities of the kingdom, at the call of the Democratic Confederation of Labor (CDT), one of the three most representative trade union federations.
Despite the ban on demonstrations decreed by the authorities – justified by the state of health emergency still in force in Morocco – the union has maintained its call for mobilization. Objective : « Protester against the unprecedented rise in prices and to denounce the indifference of the government in the face of the worsening of the social crisis”, explains Younès Firachine, member of the executive bureau of the CDT, considering that the authorities “have not taken concrete measures to preserve the purchasing power of Moroccans, which continues to collapse”.
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