From tea to cars, Egypt and Tunisia struggle to pay for imports

that limit customers to one bag of flour or two litres of milk are sometimes unnecessary, because there is nothing to buy. Supermarket shelves in Tunisia have been stripped bare in recent weeks. Cooking oil, coffee, sugar and butter are all hard to find, especially outside the capital. Some supermarkets even ration bottled water. Shoppers at malls in Cairo had a similar experience all summer: stocks of consumer goods, from clothing to furniture, are running low.Shortages have been an unhappy reality for consumers around the world since 2020. Tampons have been scarce in America; France has run low on mustard. In the Middle East, though, empty shelves are not merely the result of supply-chain kinks. They are also signs of indebted, cash-strapped governments struggling to pay for basic imports.