WORLD FOOD SECURITY:Tension is high in the queues outside the bread shops of Egypt, as Mary Fitzgeraldreports from Alexandria in the first of a series on the world food crisis
FOR MONTHS now, the queue outside Ahmed Shandawili's tiny bakery in Alexandria has formed long before dawn each morning. Men, women and even bleary-eyed children join the often disorderly line to make sure they can buy enough bread before it runs out.
More than 1,200 puffy discs of rough baladi (country) bread tumble out of Ahmed's dusty oven every day but he says he could easily sell five times that amount.
"There is huge pressure these days because other foods have become so expensive," he explains.
"People are eating more subsidised bread because they can afford little else."
The global rise in food prices, which has prompted warnings from the World Bank, the IMF and the UN's World Food Programme, is being keenly felt in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous nation and a country where an estimated 40 per cent of people live in poverty.
With almost 20 per cent of Egyptians living on less than $1 a day, even a slight wobble in food prices brings the potential for crisis. But what Egypt has experienced in the last 12 months, say analysts, is not so much a wobble as a devastating lurch. Official figures show the price of food in Egypt has increased by an average of 23.5 per cent in the past year.
The price of both cereals and bread has soared by 48.1 per cent; cooking oil by 45.2 per cent; dairy goods 20 per cent and vegetables 15 per cent.
The price hikes mean rice and pasta - staple foods among the country's poor, particularly when combined with lentils in the popular dish known as "koshari" - are now out of reach for millions of Egyptians. The government, however, has managed to keep the price of subsidised bread stable at less than one cent per loaf.
It needs to. For decades Egypt, one of the world's largest importers of wheat, has provided subsidised flour to bakers to produce cheap bread for the poor as a costly but essential element of its economic policy.
State-subsidised bread enables millions of Egyptians to survive on meagre salaries and - so official thinking goes - helps stave off political discontent. About 85 percent of Egypt's bread, some 230 million loaves a day, is subsidised.
As a result bread is central to the Egyptian diet - reflected in the fact that Egyptians refer to it using the colloquial word "aish", which means life, rather than the standard Arabic "khobz".
Outside Ahmed's bakery in Ghobrian, a working-class district of Alexandria, Egypt's second largest city, people are getting irritable in the morning heat. Some have been queuing for hours to buy the subsidised bread, which costs less than 20 cent for 20 round, flat loaves, the maximum allowed at one time.
Many will join the queue several times to make sure they have enough for their large, extended families that day. In the jostling for position tempers begin to fray.
"We are close to killing each other for bread," one woman moans. She is half-joking but others in the queue talk of what has happened in other parts of Egypt. Since early February at least 11 people have died in bread lines, either from exhaustion, heart attacks or accidents.
Two were stabbed when fights broke out between customers vying for places in the queue. In Alexandria, lurid rumours swirl of the man whose hand was chopped off when he tried to skip a queue, or the angry customer who set fire to a bakery because the owner refused to sell him more loaves.
"All we have left to survive is bread," says one woman, the mother of five children. Another, Hanan, is six months pregnant and complains of the daily wait. "Every day I'm standing here for hours just to get enough to feed my family," she says. "What did we do to deserve this?" A man behind her interrupts: "The government is not doing enough. These difficulties will force people to take desperate measures."
Everyone here remembers the bread riots of 1977, when a government decision to lift subsidies on bread triggered the only mass popular uprising in Egypt in the last 50 years.
More than 70 people died before then president Anwar Sadat restored the old policy.
Earlier this month thousands of workers and youths clashed with police in the industrial town of Mahalla el-Kubra in the Nile Delta. Four people, one aged 15, were killed and scores more injured and detained. Many fear wider unrest.
"What we are witnessing now is a very unstable situation," says Diaa Rashwan, an analyst at Cairo's Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
"There is very real suffering and we cannot exclude the possibility of serious violent confrontation. Everyone in government here has such fears."
In an effort to alleviate the crisis, President Hosni Mubarak recently ordered the army to bake and distribute bread, and drew on currency reserves to import more wheat. An extra $850 million (€540 million) has been spent on wheat this year and the total bill is expected to be well over $2.5 billion (€1.6 million). Mubarak also ordered a crackdown on unscrupulous bakers who sell their subsidised flour on the black market.
Ahmed El-Naggar, an economist who has advised the government on the crisis, says. "It's a huge problem. The government should remove all subsidies on flour and put them on bread instead so only the customer benefits," he said. "It should also increase the overall subsidy."
Only months ago some Egyptian officials were proposing a change in the country's food subsidy policy to help reduce a budget deficit estimated at more than 5.3 per cent of gross domestic product in 2006-2007.
No one dares mention such a plan now.
Gamal Mubarak, son and heir-apparent of President Mubarak, said recently that the government would not hesitate "for a minute" to increase subsidies on basic products if necessary.
Meanwhile, back at Ahmed's bakery the grumbling continues. "Even in Iraq they have enough bread," says one man bitterly. "Everything is wrong with our country."
Tomorrow: The factors that have contributed to the crisis
Egypt's inflation
In the 12-month period up to March, the price of
both cereals and bread rose by 48.1 per cent, according to Egypt's
Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics.
The price of cooking oil rose by 45.2 per cent while foodstuffs as a whole rose by an average of 23.5 per cent. Prices for dairy goods rose 20 per cent and vegetables 15 per cent. The general inflation rate for the 12-month period stood at 15.8 per cent.