Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt

Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat, yet imports represent less than half the wheat consumed in the country annually. In colloquial Egyptian Arabic, the word for bread is aish, which also means “life.” Egyptians eat bread with every meal, and the government heavily subsidizes the popular aish baladi (“local bread,” roughly); for the 70 percent of the Egyptians who have ration cards, ten loaves cost less than a dime. Ever since bread riots nearly upended reform plans in 1977, successive governments have carefully guarded the subsidy programs. But as Barnes notes, most of the wheat grown in Egypt never reaches the market at all, constituting instead a part of the mix of subsistence crops planted annually by farmers for their own households. The government is the sole legal buyer of domestic wheat, supplementing it with imports managed by the Ministry of Supply, which then distributes the grain to mills that provide flour to millions of private bakeries. The continuing reliance of Egyptian farmers on subsistence agriculture is quite striking in a country that has long produced cotton and other agricultural goods for global markets; the government’s overriding preoccupation with ensuring stability ensures that market forces do not alter that calculus.