Burden On Beasts As Gaza Strip Hits Rock Bottom

WITH petrol stations in the besieged Gaza Strip shut down and diesel tanks left to run dry, one industry should be looking forward to a boom.

Yet for Gazas thousands of donkey and pony cart operators, the eclipse of their motorised rivals is doing little to lift the general gloom caused by Israels blockade of the territory.

"Maybe in the near future, when the fuel runs out entirely, business will pick up a little, but for now were in as much trouble as anybody else," says Hamza Jalhoun, 22, waiting for a fare in a pony cart rank at Jabaliya vegetable market in northern Gaza.

"The food for the ponies keeps going up in price. A 50-kilo bag of oats is twice what it was before the Israelis started their siege in June, and business is down because no one has any money any more. When we cant feed them any more, well have to turn our animals loose in the street to find their own food."

The carts compete with trucks for light cargo business by charging a third of the price for a journey that takes around three times as long: in Gaza these days, few people are in much of a hurry.

"Usually we just carry light loads, peoples furniture, vegetables, things like that," says Mr Jalhoun. "We still charge the same prices, but taxis and trucks have now doubled theirs because they can only get fuel on the black market. The furthest we go is to Nusseirat (20 kilometres to the south), which costs 50 shekels ($A15) and takes about an hour and a half. A truck would take half an hour but would cost you 150 shekels — when there is fuel."

But while the four-legged sectors share of the market may have increased since the siege began, the market itself has shrunk considerably, and costs have soared.

"As the price of feed has gone up, the cost of animals is actually going down," said another pony driver, 21-year-old Ahmed Matar. "It used to be 1000 Jordanian dinars ($A1600) for a good pony, but now its only 700. Donkeys that were 500 dinars are now only 200 or 300."

With 1.5 million people crammed into 365 square kilometres of semi-desert and barren concrete, the Gaza Strip produces little fodder of its own.

"There isnt enough land to grow food here for them and most of the agricultural land we do have is along the (border) fence," says Mr Jalhoun. "If you try and grow anything there the tanks just come and destroy it. And its too dangerous to go there. A lot of farmers are shot."

All hay and oats have to be imported through border crossings controlled by Israel, which began restricting imports of what it terms non-essential goods after Hamas took control of Gaza in June. Mussab Nyasa, 20, a Jabaliya feed merchant, said that the reduction in supply has doubled the price of a 50-kilogram bag of animal oats from 50 to 100 shekels, triggering a collapse in the market.

"I used to get 80 tonnes of oats a month and now Im only buying 10 tonnes, if I can get it. A lot of people who kept livestock or chickens or pigeons have now slaughtered them and eaten them because they cant afford to feed them any more. Its a chain reaction. The Israelis reduced the quantity of feed getting in, so the prices went up. People couldnt afford the new prices so they slaughtered their animals, and so the demand went down."

One of his customers, 22-year-old Ibrahim Farah, said he used to buy three kilos of oats a day for his eight-year-old donkey mare Sundus, a draught animal in his familys tile factory. "Now its too dear, so mostly I look for green grass by the road. But its very hard. This is a desert, and everybody else is trying the same thing."

Mr Farah said that the donkey was having to work harder because fuel shortages had forced the family to take its truck off the road. This, coupled with the reduction in food quality, had stressed the visibly skinny donkey to the point where she was no longer producing enough milk for her foal. "If the milk runs out in the end it will die, but what can we do?"

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