Vegetables prices in Egypt have seen a steep rise over the past couple of days, Egyptian independent newspaper El Watan reports. Before the Eid El-Adha holiday at the end of September the cost of a kilo of tomatoes was three to four Egyptian pounds ($US 0.38-0.51). Now it varies between EGP 12 to 14 ($US 1.35-1.79), a price hike El Watan labels ‘insanely high’. Prices for other vegetables such as zucchini, green peppers, okra, green beans and potatoes have also mostly doubled, with a kilo of potatoes now generally costing seven pounds ($US 0.89) instead of three pounds ($US 0.38) and a kilo of zucchini roughly going up from five to nine pounds ($US 0.64 to 1.15). The steep rise in prices have caused anger among citizens and some of them have started a social media campaign called Belaha Tamatim, which roughly translates to ‘let’s forget about tomatoes’. The campaign is mirrored to a similar initiative to protest the rising price of meat, called Belaha Lahma, and which has slowly been gaining steam since the beginning of August and currently boasts almost 16,000 members in its Facebook group. Belaha Tamatim isn’t very popular yet on Facebook, with only 22 members at the time this…
