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Around 200 Tunisian bakers staged a sit-in Monday after a government decision to stop selling them subsidised flour, a move threatening the closure of hundreds of bakeries.
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“We are being forbidden from producing baguettes,” Mohamed Jamali, president of the Association of Modern Bakeries, told AFP in Tunis where the protest took place.
Last week the ministry of commerce banned some 1,500 privately-owned bakeries that produced European-style breads and pastries from purchasing subsidised flour, ending a practice that had lasted for more than a decade.
It came after President Kais Saied proclaimed in late July that there should be “one type of bread for all Tunisians” in an official video address.
According to Jamali, the European-style bakeries which employ around 18,000 people have been “unable to operate for a week” since August 1.
Demonstrators who rallied around him held up signs that read: “bread, freedom, national dignity,” and “thousands of employees will be laid off”.
“The people you see here today have not been able to carry out their regular activity, which is the production of bread,” Jamali said.
Abdelbeki Abdellawi, 43, warned that some bakers might end up “facing imprisonment” because they can’t afford to pay their rent or loans.
Tunisia’s “modern bakeries” sell baguettes and other kinds of breads and pastries in which they use part of the subsidised flour.
“Why is there subsidised bread and unsubsidised bread? The purpose is to hit Tunisians in their purchasing power and threaten social peace,” Saied had said on July 27.
The president criticised the “modern…
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