ALBANIANS FACE THE BREAD BOGEYMAN
Since the Meksi government came to power, all prices have risen tenfold. This government is preparing to double the price of bread on July 1.
THE 24-LEK BREAD IS EXPECTED TO COST 46 LEK
The increase in the price of bread will inevitably bring increases in the prices of a range of other necessities, from pasta to meat and milk.
Residents of villages, as well as all those not employed by the state, will receive no compensation of any kind.
The government’s study artificially lowers bread consumption from 750 grams per person per day to 500 grams per person per day. This reduction is intended to keep compensation as low as possible. The study of bread consumption was conducted among 70 employees of the Ministry of Finance who, according to Ruli, represent the whole country.
For more than a week, serious disruptions in the supply of bread to the population have begun in the capital and in the districts. The PD’s election promises of seven kinds of bread have turned out to be seven times a sham.
From well-informed internal sources, we learn that Mr. Ruli, with the help of specialists from the IMF and the World Bank, conducted a survey-study of 70 families of employees of the apparatus of the Ministry of Finance and Economy and concluded that citizens are consuming less and less bread and more and more meat, vegetables, fruit and... Coca-Cola.
According to this study, a citizen of Tirana (who has been taken as representative of all the country’s other citizens) apparently consumes no more than 500 g of bread a day, so raising the price of a 1,850-gram standard loaf from 240 lek (old lek) to 460 lek supposedly poses no problem!
According to the study’s authors, this price increase will be compensated for. The obedient subjects of the Republic of Albania already know what “compensation” means in the language of the “democratic” Government of Mesi and Sali Berisha.
With this price, the PD is drawing much closer to Europe and moving ever farther from its balloon-like promises, with which it won the parliamentary elections of March 22, 1992. Among other things, those promises included the slogan of seven kinds of bread at symbolic prices, guaranteed by the state.
The fictitious reduction of the bread consumption allowance per person from 750 grams to 500 grams a day, or nearly by a factor of 1.3, is made with the deceptive aim of demagoguery and also of paying as little compensation as possible.
Can an ordinary family of workers, miners, construction workers and oil workers manage on 500 grams a day per person? Everyone can do the sums for themselves: if we can bear to accept this experiment at our own expense, fine; otherwise, let us demand an accounting from the Government, which, through its economic policy, has brought the country to the edge of the abyss and the brink of mass impoverishment.
It is clear that the increase in the price of bread will bring price increases for a range of goods connected with its raw materials—wheat, flour, pasta—and surely for other everyday foodstuffs such as meat, milk, eggs, etc. Ruli the “theoretician’s” study makes no provision for wage compensation to offset these price rises; as a result, a family with a low per-capita income (let alone those who are on assistance or receive no assistance) is heading toward chronic crisis. The compensation for categories of employees covered by the budget is apparently calculated at the value of eight loaves of bread per month!
The largest categories of the population will receive no compensation: village residents, employees of enterprises not financed from the budget, that is, those with their own accounts, private-sector workers, etc. As for employees of the former state agricultural enterprises (NB), the proposed arrangement for partial compensation through the end of 1993 is wholly inadequate.
The bread-price increase takes no account of any economic criterion or logic, given that the price of wheat on the international market in a favorable season does not exceed 10–12 lek (new lek) per kg. So why should the price of bread be raised to nearly twice its current level and ten times what it was a year ago, when the “very popular” Meksi Government came to power? Is this how the state budget will be filled? Or is it that the world is no longer helping and the Government no longer knows how to govern?
This way, private farmers can be “forced” to stop planting watermelons and plant wheat instead! Gentlemen, you are far behind (and at the same time on the wrong track), because you still have not distributed the land across a large part of the country. Only after that should we talk about other essential measures for farmers, such as fertilizers, machinery, pesticides and herbicides, irrigation canals, etc.—all of which, until now, you have proudly proclaimed to the world that you have utterly destroyed. Thus, raising the wheat procurement price from 8 lek (new lek) to 14 lek per kg will be nothing more, for a long time yet, than a propaganda slogan or a measure with only very limited effect.
Gentlemen, you are incapable of leading this country toward Europe. Do not ruin it; do not add further to its poverty, which has reached the point where it can take no more. So it would be better for you to resign.