Can bread subsidies keep pace with urbanisation in Egypt?

Rising bread prices are said to have been a significant cause of the recent unrest in North Africa.  Egypt in particular has to import about 60% of its wheat needs each year, at a cost of $63 million at today’s price of $340 per tonne, making it the world’s largest wheat importer.  

Since one in five of Egypt’s 80 million people currently have a daily income of less than $1, their government has been forced to bear the additional cost of subsidising bread for 14.2 million poor people each day, in order to stave off widespread hunger and starvation.  This subsidy represents almost a quarter of state spending and reduces the amount available for health and education.

Egyptian farmers currently produce 8.5 million tonnes of wheat each year. However, although self-sufficiency in wheat at national level is said to be the government’s urgent goal, successive UNDP reports have criticised the Mubarak regime for neglecting the rural areas, where poverty remains rampant and migration to the city in search of work becomes the only option.

Urbanisation has been dramatic in Egypt, with the capital city, Cairo, growing from 1.5 to 6 million between 1947 and 1986.  Despite the high birth rate in Cairo’s slums, internal migration still accounts for 50% of the population growth, which has now reached 18 million in the greater Cairo region4. Unfortunately all of this urban growth has spilled into areas that are ideal for wheat production.

The deepest poverty is found in the rural areas of Upper Egypt that have a medium to high potential for wheat production:  According to UNDP Upper Egypt accommodates 36% of the country’s population and two-thirds of these people are unable to meet their basic food and non-food needs.  UNDP’s recommendations to address this problem have included:

·        increasing food productivity of small-holder farmers,

·        getting their farm products to markets,

·        empowering farmers’ associations to negotiate with market intermediaries,

·        enhancing rural credit and saving services,

·        encouraging investments in building storage facilities,

·        supporting networks of  agro-dealers,

·        expanding income-generating opportunities for the rural landless.

They have also stressed the need for increasing access to health care as well as primary and secondary education.

With the world wheat price expected to rise still further, Egypt’s new government would do well to take these recommendations much more seriously than did the previous regime. 

Fighting for Farmers' Rights

75, 000 participants representing the world’s social movements from 132 countries, including Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Morocco, Guinea-Bissau, the Gambia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Cameroon, Guinea and Western Sahara met in Dakar, Senegal this week. Here some highlights of their Final Declaration:


“Since 2001, we have also witnessed the eruption of a systemic crisis that has expanded into a food crisis, an environmental crisis, and financial and economic crises, and has led to an increase in migrations and forced displacement, exploitation, debt levels and social inequities.


We fight against transnational corporations because they support the capitalist system, privatize life, public services and common goods such as water, air, land, seeds and mineral resources. Transnational corporations promote wars through their contracts with private corporations and mercenaries; their extractionist practices endanger life and nature, expropriating our land and developing genetically modified seeds and food, taking away the peoples’ right to food and destroying biodiversity.


We demand that all people should enjoy full sovereignty in choosing their way of life. We demand the implementation of policies to protect local production, to give dignity to agricultural work and to protect the ancestral values of life. We denounce neoliberal free-trade treaties and demand freedom of movement for all the human beings.


We fight for climate justice and food sovereignty. Global climate change is a product of the capitalist system of production, distribution and consumption. Transnational corporations, international financial institutions and governments serving them do not want to reduce greenhouse gases. 


We denounce “green capitalism” and refuse false solutions to the climate crisis such as biofuels, genetically modified organisms and mechanisms of the carbon market like REDD, which ensnare impoverished peoples with false promises of progress while privatizing and commodifying the forests and territories where these peoples have been living for thousands of years.


We support sustainable peasant agriculture; it is the true solution to the food and climate crises and includes access to land for all who work on it. Because of this, we call for a mass mobilisation to stop the landgrab and support local peasants’ struggles.”

The loss of countless generations of farming skills…

Smallholder farmers currently produce more than 50% of the world’s food and contribute significantly to national GDP in developing countries by producing commodities such as cotton, sunflower, groundnut, coffee and cocoa.  Unfortunately, these farmers remain poor as they rarely profit from cash cropping.  The main reasons for this are the high costs of inputs, restricted access to markets, limited ability to negotiate fair prices and a lack of understanding of the importance of keeping records to calculate the profitability of their enterprise .  

Subsistence farmers who cannot make a living from the land are forced to re-locate into urban areas, in the search for a better life.  However, they are ill-equipped to compete in the jobs market and are thus likely to end up living in slum conditions.  Already more than half of the world’s population inhabits urban areas and 180, 000 people are moving from rural areas to cities each day - that's 125 per minute.  One billion of these people are stuck in slums – a figure that is expected to double by 2030.  Slum dwellers are subject to on-going poverty, increased disease, drug dependency and violence. Furthermore, each farming family that vacates the land looses their community interdependence, distinct cultural values, essential farming skills that have been passed down over countless generations and changes from being self-reliant in food to being dependent on imported food.