Shortage cuts Egyptians' access to daily bread

from The Daily Star

Asma Rushdi must wake up at dawn each day to queue up for the bread ration that will feed her family of eight, as Egypt struggles to cope with shortages that threaten a major political crisis. "I've been here since six this morning, it is now nine o'clock and still no bread," Rushdi shouts in front of a tiny state-owned bakery in the overcrowded and impoverished area of Bulaq Dakrur in Cairo.

She is only allowed to spend 1 Egyptian pound ($0.18) that will get her 20 pieces of the subsidized flat round bread - the staple of the Egyptian diet.

For Asma, who has to feed her family, including four children and two in-laws, from her husband's meager monthly salary of just 200 pounds, "bread is everything."

Egypt is in the grip of a serious bread crisis brought on by a combination of the rising cost of wheat on world markets and sky-rocketing inflation.

The price of bread has increased fivefold in private bakeries, creating panic in state-run bakeries that the staple may run out. Scuffles in bread queues are a daily occurrence. In recent weeks, they have turned into violent clashes, leaving at least seven people dead, according to police.

Police clashed with protesters in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla on Sunday, firing tear gas and arresting dozens after angry residents demanding an end to price hikes and soaring inflation set two schools ablaze and burnt tires along the city's railway.

Egypt is the world's biggest per capita consumer of bread, with each Egyptian eating 400 grams of bread a day. That compares with France - the land of baguette - where the figure is only 130 grams.

The shortages have forced bakers and consumers onto the black market.

According to the state-owned daily Al-Ahram, 12,000 people have been detained in raids across the country in recent days and are all to face justice over selling flour on the black market.

A 100 kilogram sack of subsidized flour is worth about $3.14. The same sack costs $377 on the black market.

The government is desperately scrambling to contain the crisis. On Friday the authorities announced plans to suspend rice exports for six months from April and the commerce ministry said cement exports will also be frozen over the same period in a bid to combat price rises.

Tackling their rising cost is a government priority with inflation reaching an annual rate of 12.5 percent at the end of February in the most populous Arab nation, which is home to 78 million people.

Last month President Hosni Mubarak mobilized the army's ovens to deal with the shortages, telling the army and the Interior Ministry, which control bakeries usually used to make bread for the troops, to increase their production.

On Wednesday, Mubarak ordered customs duties lifted from a number of imported goods including rice, butter, dairy products, cooking oil and powdered baby milk.

The government, which has been hit by growing popular unrest, including strikes and protests from workers, farmers, teachers and doctors, is eager to avoid a repeat of the 1977 bread riots that killed at least 70 people after the government tried to reduce subsidies on the staple product.

Egypt's cultivatable and inhabitable land makes up only a tiny percentage of the country's total land surface.

With its galloping demographic rate, Egypt is forced to import 55 percent of the 14 million tons of wheat consumed every year.

Its biggest suppliers for the last two years have been Russia and Kazakhstan.

The decades-old subsidized bread system is an old remnant of Gamal Abdel Nasser's socialist regime.

Government subsidies have gone up in this fiscal year by three billion dollars to reach $13.7 billion, according to official figures, a crippling nine percent of the country's GDP.

Despite having an official growth rate of seven percent, Egypt suffers from rampant unemployment Wall-Street-Layoffs , and 40 percent of the population lives on or around the poverty line of two dollars a day.