Every second café, bar and restaurant in Northern Cyprus has closed in the past 5 years

The Turkish Cypriot Chamber of Craftsmen and Shopkeepers (KTEZO) published alarming findings from a study on the state of the food and beverage sector in Kyrenia. According to the data collected, out of 120 cafés, bars and restaurants registered with the chamber over the past five years, 52 have ceased operations and were removed from the social insurance system. This means that 43% of businesses in this segment were forced to shut down — nearly every second establishment.

During the study, chamber representatives contacted business directors to confirm the current status of their operations and cross-checked the information with the social insurance database. The conclusions were bleak: economic pressure on small and medium-sized businesses continues to grow.

As highlighted in the KTEZO statement, negative factors — primarily economic instability, rising prices of food and raw materials, increasing labor costs, and a decline in activity in the tourism and university sectors — have hit the industry hard, which traditionally provides jobs to a large number of young people. Chamber representative Hürrem Tulga noted that such mass closures are unprecedented even by international standards. According to her, the country is being harmed by a lack of strategic planning, incompetence, and inability to solve problems collectively: “With such an approach, progress is impossible.”