Chambers of Industry: 95% of Local Products Disappear from Markets

Sudan Events – Rehab Abdullah

The former Secretary-General of the Chambers of Industry Union, Ashraf Salah Nouddin, said that the destruction of factories due to the militia war in Khartoum and the Gezira clearly affected the availability of goods and services.
He confirmed in his interview with (Sudan Events), which will be published later, that it caused an almost complete absence of more than 95% of local products from the markets, adding that even the simplest products have now become imported from abroad in light of the weak and incapable economy that existed before the war, and after the war it became an economy incapable of providing hard currency for imports, pointing out that this caused a jump in dollar prices to record levels, as is happening now, and also led to fluctuation in the availability of the necessary imported goods themselves in the markets, in addition to the significant increase in their prices, besides the lack of many of these goods to the required quality and not conforming to the required specifications. In addition, it is not in line with the taste of the Sudanese consumer.
He stressed that an accurate inventory of the damages that befell the industrial sector had not begun for a fundamental reason, and he attributed this to the continuation of the war until now and the inaccessibility of the major industrial areas in Khartoum State, which, as it is known, the states of Khartoum and Gezira contain more than 90% of these industrial units, and they are still war pand clashes and battles zones, adding that even the state or the Ministry of Industry was unable to make an inventory of these losses for the same reason. However, he stressed that preliminary estimates indicate that the percentage of complete destruction of industrial sector units exceeded 50%, varying between partial destruction and total destruction. As for vandalism and looting, he saw that it is almost 100%.