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This article participates on the following special index pages:
Price Controls and Shortages - Index of articles
'A
banana costs more than my house'
BBC
News
July 09, 2007
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6284186.stm
There has been a wave
of panic buying in many shops in Zimbabwe as the government enforces
radical price cutting measures to try to tackle the world's highest
rate of inflation - more than 3,700%. One resident of Harare describes
how the inflation is making life difficult for everyone, even those
who are relatively well off:
At the pharmacy, I wait
again in the gloom to have a repeat prescription filled.
It is for Phenobarbital
tablets for my partner's mentally handicapped son, who suffers from
epilepsy.
The tablets have gone
up by 30,000 Zimbabwe dollars ($0.93 at the official exchange rate;
$0.10 at the dominant black market rate) in a single day.
Hundreds of people are
clamouring around the supermarkets, so I assume there has been one
of the rare deliveries of basics like sugar or salt.
There is nothing I can
afford.
A single banana costs
15 times more than I paid for my four-bedroom house seven years
ago.
One candle now sells
at 120,000 Zimbabwe dollars (US $3.70; $0.42).
That is twice as much
as the government's stipulated farm worker's wage.
"This isn't living,
it's barely surviving," I tell myself, but I know that so many
Zimbabweans are not even surviving.
They are dying
of hunger, malnutrition or preventable diseases.
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