The Libyan government is seeking to regain control over the strategic issue of cereal and agricultural raw materials imports to strengthen the market’s supply of basic goods, while maintaining control over its foreign currency reserves.
At the start of the current month, the Libyan Ministry of Economy and Trade announced the entry into force of new measures regulating the import of wheat, corn, barley, and soybeans, with the aim of limiting the role of intermediaries, curbing speculation and better securing the local market supply.
In this regard, the new framework provides to “reserve import authorizations for actual production units”, namely mills, livestock feed manufacturers and agro-food industrialists, and to “exclude operators who import to resell shipments on the domestic market”.
In the same perspective, the volumes allowed for importation will now have to be linked to “real production capacities”, while “a digital tracking system” is planned to enable tracing of goods from their entry into the country to their final destination.
Through these new measures, the Libyan government aims to “correct a drift that has become costly”, as the ministry stressed in a press release, while noting that authorizations granted last year for the importation of cereals and raw materials exceeded 900 million dollars, without “stabilizing prices nor easing production costs”.
The root cause of the disruptions affecting cereal distribution chains on the local market, the supervising ministry blames “the proliferation of brokers” and “the speculative use of shipments, diverted from their productive purpose to fuel resale and price increases”.
In Libya, it should be noted that prices of wheat and livestock feed directly influence the prices of animal-origin products, such as meats, poultry, eggs and other poultry products.
