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Turkey has banned chicken exports and cracked down on “exorbitant” food prices ahead of the Ramadan religious holiday at a time of economic hardship, stubbornly high inflation — and a row over an alleged $520 restaurant bill for a plate of meatballs.
Inspectors have been dispatched across the country to scour markets for what ministers have called “unfair price increases, market-disrupting practices and any attempts to mislead consumers”. The trade ministry also suspended chicken exports after producers and retailers raised prices by as much as 15 per cent.
Rising prices have undermined the popularity of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government, with recent polls suggesting that three-quarters of Turks believe the economy is poorly managed.
“We are on the ground against hoarding and exorbitant pricing practices,” trade minister Ömer Bolat said last week. “Our inspections will continue resolutely to ensure that citizens can shop peacefully, as befits the spiritual atmosphere of Ramadan.”
Ramadan, which starts in Turkey on Thursday, is at once the holiest and most festive month in the Islamic calendar. Adherents refrain from eating and drinking between sunrise and sunset, breaking fast after dusk with a large dinner, a practice that can concentrate food demand and cause a jump in prices.
A food safety inspector conducts an inspection at a butcher shop in Istanbul ahead of Ramadan © Saffet Azak/Anadolu/Getty Images
However, this year’s pre-Ramadan crackdown — with accompanying fines that can reach 1.8mn lira ($41,000) for “exorbitant price increases” — also responds to simmering public disquiet about the country’s cost of living crisis.
More than one-third of Turks say living costs are now their biggest problem, according to the government’s latest life satisfaction survey, with food inflation — running at 32 per cent — a chief concern.
Even well-to-do industrialists have complained. Burhan Özdemir, head of MÜSİAD, a pro-government business association, said this week that no one in Turkey seemed to know the price of anything anymore.
“Nobody in this country asks what the cost of a kilo of ice cream is,” Özdemir said in a recent newspaper interview. “It’s abnormal to drink tea for 500 lira in one place and 5 lira in another. There is no such price gap anywhere in the world.”
Distorted food prices have long been a hot potato. Six years ago, then finance minister Berat Albayrak, who is also Erdoğan’s son-in-law, accused farmers of hoarding goods to sell later at a higher price, calling it “food terror”.
Mehmet Şimşek, the current finance minister, uses technocratic language more in keeping with the orthodox policies he implemented almost three years ago; he has been trying to curb the dramatic price rises unleashed by Albayrak’s ultra-low interest rate policies.
After food prices jumped by 7 per cent last month, Şimşek commented that it was due to “adverse weather conditions”, and would have a limited effect on “the underlying trend of inflation”.
Few Turks believe such forecasts, however. The IMF, while praising Simsek’s reforms, also warned this month that inflation “remains well above target”, was “taking a toll on . . . inequality” and that volatile food prices were one of the “main risks” to the central bank’s target.
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Inflation, currently at 31 per cent, is down from its 86 per cent peak three and a half years ago. But the central bank overshot last year’s 24 per cent target and household surveys show Turks believe inflation this year could be as much as triple the official 16 per cent target for 2026.
A recent price scandal shows how complicated economic life has become. Deputy trade minister Mahmut Gürcan responded this week to claims “circulating on various social media platforms and news websites” about a diner who claimed he had been charged TL22,850 ($522) for a portion of meatballs and a salad.
“As a result of investigations,” Gürcan said on Tuesday, it was found that the aggrieved diner, named as Murat Ş, had ordered other food, as well as alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks.