Fact Checking the Arab Media

On July 29th, 2022, the news website Al-Monitor published an article linking Tunisia’s food crisis directly to the Ukraine war. In the lede, the Week In Review staff asserted that the country “has been slammed by a global food crisis and energy turmoil unleashed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

”While the war has had a strong impact on the importation of wheat as well as some other foods, omitting the several different causes of the overall food shortage can mislead readers into believing that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the only explanation for Tunisia’s food supply crisis. Indeed, in a number of other articles addressing the same topic, journalists have also talked about droughts, discontinuities in agricultural policies, the absence of grain reserves, outstanding payments from earlier wheat shipments, and difficulties in the mobilization of foreign currency exacerbated by a deteriorating credit rating for the country.

Moreover, Tunisia’s supply problems started well before the war. In October 2021, former Tunisian parliamentarian Yassine Ayari publicized existing worries about potential shortages in wheat-based products. Local media has also reported about authorities’ difficulties to import grains since at least December 2021. By mid-January of this year, the Ministry of Trade started responding to rising concerns about the country’s ability to cover its needs. Within two weeks, i.e. the end of January 2022, they had to provide explanations for the already observable shortage of vegetable oil - in fact, the rationing of semolina started soon after, in mid-February 2022. When the war itself started on February 24, Tunisian social media accounts were already sharing pictures of empty shelves in supermarkets. Then, in June 2022, the World Bank clarified that, in addition to the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, food prices were “already high and rising before the war started” and that institutional deficiencies are at the core of Tunisia’s food security problems. Finally, Tunisian markets have witnessed shortages of several categories of products (rice, oil, sugar, etc.) imported from countries unaffected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Fact-Checking Assessment: True But Misleading

By focusing on the Ukraine war as an external shock and overlooking the early phase of the food crisis and the subsequent generalization of the crisis to non-wheat products, the article provides a misleading explanation of the shortages Tunisia has been facing since the beginning of 2022.