Damascus – “Al-Quds Al-Arabi”: The United Nations World Food Program warned, on Friday, that hunger rates in Syria have reached record levels in a country wracked by bloody conflict and accompanied by chronic economic and financial collapse.
The program said in a statement that, nearly 12 years after the outbreak of the conflict, “12 million people do not know where their next meal will come from, while 2.9 million are at risk of slipping into hunger,” which means that seventy percent of Syrians “may be unable to Soon they will be able to put food on the table for their families.” The program added that “hunger is at its highest level” after 12 years of conflict. In light of these difficult economic conditions, all Muslim women in Syria have become more like a dream, as food, clothing, electricity, gas and diesel are everything that has become hard to come by. According to the “Click News” website, the prices of medicine drained the pockets after they multiplied dozens of times, and because the citizen is powerless, he found no way in front of him except pharmacies, hoping that they would guide him to a medicine that might relieve his pain, no matter how great it is.
Today, Syria has the sixth highest number in the world in terms of food insecurity, according to the program, which also warned of increasing rates of malnutrition of children and their mothers “at an unprecedented rate, even during more than a decade of war.”
“If we don’t deal with this humanitarian crisis in Syria, things will get worse in a way we can’t imagine,” said David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Program, during a visit to Damascus this week. He warned that this “may lead to a new wave of displacement, like the one that swept across Europe in 2015,” asking, “Is this what the international community wants?”
After years of war, Syria is witnessing a suffocating economic crisis, accompanied by a 12-fold rise in the prices of basic materials during the past three years alone, almost permanent power outages, and a scarcity of fuel, and the majority of the population is below the poverty line. The crisis was exacerbated by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, and then the spread of the cholera epidemic during the past months in a country where the conflict has depleted service systems, especially the health sector.
One of the pharmacists says: “Sometimes they pity the patient and prescribe medicine for him after describing the condition that the person suffers from.” He added: “By virtue of our long experience in dispensing medicines, we know the medicine for any disease that is prescribed,” noting that “if the patient had the fee for a doctor’s examination, he would not have He came to us.”
The people describe the fees for seeing doctors in Syria as becoming more severe than the disease itself, as many doctors have become more like merchants with the aim of increasing their profits, and in some of them it exceeded 50 thousand Syrian pounds, in high-end areas, while it reached 20 thousand Syrian pounds in popular areas. A few days ago, the Ministry of Health raised the prices of most pharmaceutical items by a rate ranging from 50 to 100 percent, amid the complaints of factory owners and their dissatisfaction with this increase, which caused a disaster, especially for those with chronic diseases, whose salary is no longer sufficient for the price of medicine.
And the prices of chicken meat continued to rise in Syria, coinciding with the decline in demand as a result of the weak purchasing power of most citizens, as the shawarma sandwich became the preserve of the rich. The cost of one kilo of live chicken reached 15,000 pounds, and the cost of a dish of eggs was 22,000 pounds, which increased the prices, and the price of a kilogram of chicken meat exceeded 40,000 pounds, a kilo of chicken was 20,000 pounds, and a plate of eggs was 25,000 pounds in the heart of the capital, Damascus. The price of a shawarma sandwich has become 12,000 pounds, and broiled chicken is 55-65,000 pounds.
