Fear of unrest grows as Egypts’ soaring wheat prices strain a creaking economy, writes Ian Black
It is an overcast morning in the Bulaq neighbourhood of Cairo, three hours after the muezzin’s call to prayers. The streets are choked with honking cars, while goats — and a few ragged-looking people — pick at piles of stinking rubbish overflowing from metal wheelie bins.
Tempers flare outside a government bakery as the smell of hot baladi (country) bread wafts out from the ovens. There is pushing and shoving as a worker appears at the window to hand out plastic bags of the rough, round flat loaves — each weighing a standard 160g — to customers.
”I’ve been here since before six and this is what I get,” grumbles Umm Islam, her face contorted in fury. ”My husband is retired and I have five children and it’s not enough.”
Others complain of their pitifully small incomes and shortages. In the past two months 11 people have died in bread queues, either from exhaustion, heart attacks, brawls or accidents.
It looked as if this crisis could trigger wider unrest. Last week four people were killed and scores more injured and arrested in rioting in Mahalla, an industrial town in the Nile Delta, while a general strike left the normally teeming centre of Cairo eerily quiet.
Egypt’s problems are part of a global phenomenon. The price of the wheat it imports — half the country’s needs — has tripled since late last year. But price rises have also cruelly exposed the shortcomings of a stagnant, creaking economy and regime. Prices of cooking oil, rice, pasta and sugar have soared, forcing more to rely on state-subsidised bread — at five piastres a loaf — as the main source of calories for the 40% of the population who live on or below the poverty line of about 10 Egyptian pounds a day (about R14).
In Egyptian Arabic the word for bread is aish — life — and getting enough of it is a truly existential issue. ”The word is pregnant with meaning,” says the left-wing thinker Mohammed Sayyid Said. ”It’s the basic component of life.”
President Hosni Mubarak remembers the bread riots of 1977, when scores were shot during protests against the sudden removal of subsidies, and is unlikely to risk a rerun.
”Phasing out subsidies will generate social unrest unless you can also do something about income and poverty and social services,” says John Salevurakis, who teaches economics at Cairo’s American University.
”Six months ago Egyptian ministers were hinting at looking at ways of ending or reducing subsidies. They were putting their toes in the water. That conversation has now ended,” says a diplomat.
Instead Mubarak mobilised the army to produce and distribute bread, began to jail bakers who collude with corrupt inspectors to sell their subsidised sacks of flour on the black market and dipped into the currency reserves to buy more wheat abroad.
Egypt’s economic fundamentals are impressive on paper and its liberalising prime minister, Ahmed Nazif, has won plaudits from the IMF.
Last year growth in Egypt was put at 7%, although that was driven by natural gas exports and real estate, sending property prices sky-high. The UN defines Egypt as a middle-income country. But very little of this wealth is trickling down to the poor.
”Poverty in itself does not hurt,” says Abdel-Wahhab al-Massiri, of the opposition Kefaya movement. ”What hurts is the inequality in a country where 20-million people live in slums and you have some of the best golf courses in the world.”
Critics reject the notion that the regime is the helpless victim of uncontrollable forces. ”Mubarak went on delaying difficult economic decisions that should have been taken years ago,” says commentator Hisham Qassem.
The official line is that the crisis is manageable and that media coverage is exaggerated. Analysts believe the unrest has rattled the government but can be contained, not least because the opposition is so divided. It is hard to predict how events will unfold.
None of that gives much hope to the angry people on the street. ”I’m exhausted, this country is exhausted,” says al-Haj Abdel-Salam, a retailer.
Umm Muhammad, meandering past the shops off Tahrir Square, looks exhausted, too, and sounds desperate. ”Things have got to the point where I have to beg,” murmurs the 53-year-old widow.
”My son is at university, I have a teenage daughter and another one who is sick, so now all I can do is sell tissues. There’s no other work. If God gives me six or seven pounds a day, I’m doing well. I can’t manage any longer.”– Â