Egypt’s Flawed Food Policies Need Transformative Reform
by Tarek Erfan Shafey
Egypt’s state has inherited outdated and counter-productive food policies and tradition-bound priorities that need brave, enlightened and quite achievable reforms for public health, economic efficiency and equity, climate change adaptation and sustainability. Despite its very fertile land, high agricultural output and exports, Egypt is paradoxically overpopulated and inefficient, and imports most of its food at great cost due to policy mistakes. Reform would very favorably transform its economy and citizens’ livelihoods.
An Overview
Essential food items such as bread, rice, sugar, edible oils and tea are subsidized to all at well-below market prices, fostering imports worth tens of billions of US Dollars in those items plus beef, overconsumption, and Egypt’s high rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart and other diseases. Among other factors, poor dietary choices and habits, worsened by the flawed subsidies, render many urban and rural Egyptians quite unhealthy relative to their income levels compared to nearby, low-income countries such as Sudan and Ethiopia. Moreover, other important food items such as beef, poultry, fruits and vegetables cannot be subsidized due to prohibitive costs or seasonal volatility, so (Egyptian) state budget deficit leads to even higher non-subsidized food inflation, hitting the poor hardest.
Paramount should be economic efficiency and market pricing, supporting deserving low-income citizens via direct, targeted and conditional cash support, and lower taxes on middle-higher income earners. A good model is Brazil, where food and energy are priced at market rates, with a national conditional cash transfer regime, (“Bolsa Familia” or family allowance), disbursed to the mothers, rewards responsible low-income families who commit to preventive health care and education till secondary level for their children. Such programs can also be efficiently used in Egypt to stop child labor and reward responsibly smaller families. It is cost-efficient and much fairer, allowing the state to focus more on ensuring good, affordable and reliable, public and private sector-provided education, health care and other social services for modest-income citizens. Their diet would also become healthier and better-balanced, and they could spend more on other priorities such as their homes, clothes and children’s education. Healthy state and household finances would also ensure that girls’ education in particular would not be unfairly sacrificed or neglected. This is important, given how crucial well-educated women are for Egypt’s future.
Food Policy Reform
Of our six foods in focus, we start with proteins. A prized food, beef is in high demand, unsubsidized, less healthy, costly and barely affordable for many, with excess demand fostering onerous animal and beef imports. An integrated protein strategy is needed. Chicken output has grown fast in recent decades, but more is needed. Farmed rabbits are fine sources of lean, healthy, white meat, while camel meat from the oases and water buffalo meat are healthy and low in cost. The kingpin, though, is sustainably caught fish and pollution-free farmed fish in well-picked spots, for self-sufficiency and high-profit exports. Egypt’s Mediterranean and Red Sea shores, Nile River, Aswan High Dam and other lake banks total 4,500km in length. Certifiably humane, sustainable hunting of most of the 80,000 huge High Dam Lake Nile crocodiles, exporting their (chicken-like tasting but taboo for Muslims) meat to non-Muslim Africans, and diverse leather products from their prized skins, exported and sold in Egypt’s tourist areas, would together be earners, job creators and tourism promoters worth USD 500–600 million, apart from greatly raising fish output.
Fish farm ponds vary by species, but are typically only 7m2 in area and 2.5m deep, and yield 4 tons of fish per year over two output cycles. Sustainability, water pollution control, good, well-regulated and well-refrigerated storage and transport facilities are a must. Should all protein sources become available, affordable and in more demand, beef demand and prices would fall, and with it livestock numbers, prices and the wide areas growing their feed. Awareness of and public support for of the new national food strategy can be secured via school education, media campaigns, Muslim and Christian prayer sermons, free meals to the poor, and free school meals to poor children.
We continue with staple grains. Wheat/corn-based bread is badly over-consumed and wasted, and being cheaper than animal feed, also fed to livestock, fostering onerous imports. Both demand and supply reforms are needed. Market prices for bread would cut demand, and animal feed must also become cheaper than market-priced bread, to stop its feeding to livestock. Temporary state subsidies to growers, wholesalers and retailers of the main feed crops: hay, alfalfa, corn leaves and stems, sunflower stems and heads, and “kossb” (mixed cottonseed/hay), would give them fair profits until lower beef and bread demand lowers corn and animal feed demand and prices too, allowing subsidy removal.
Supply policies need climate change adaptation. Wheat, rice and potatoes best suit Egypt’s cooler, wetter north. Only rice is salt-tolerant, but very water-wasting. With global warming, Egypt grows hotter and drier, while the rising Mediterranean Sea water will unavoidably continue to seep in and salinize the soil and groundwater of the low-lying north by 2050. The solution is dual: 1) Grow rice only in the far north Nile Delta and irrigate with freshwater to limit salinity, 2) Grow quinoa, a remarkable staple grain native to the Andes, as a rainy winter crop on Egypt’s sandy north coastline. State-sponsored, experimental growing has proven successful, with quinoa very hardy, water-efficient, salt-tolerant, nutritious, low-calorie, suitable for diabetics, and gluten-free. The delicious, nutty-tasting seeds can be cooked like rice, or crushed to make bread, pastries or as additives to infant milk. Quinoa’s high protein content is important and could benefit many low-income buyers, whose low protein and high tea intake often combine to cause anemia. Quinoa merits investments via policy incentives, active marketing and temporary subsidies only for low-income buyers, spreading its benefits wide.
Next are tea and sugar. A legacy of previous British occupation, tea is subsidized and over-consumed in Egypt, and sweetened with lots of sugar. Unknown to many, all tea is expensively imported by Egypt, where climate is too dry to grow tea or coffee. Moreover, excess tea can cause insomnia and anemia, so alternatives are needed. In nearby Morocco, locally-grown peppermint is the cooling, refreshing, and healthy national drink. The plant is well-known in Egypt and can be grown in Middle/Upper Egypt, with its mild, sunny winters and fertile soils, and so as to avoid the increasingly saltier north, as peppermint is salt-intolerant. Its growing can be encouraged by policy incentives, while tea subsidies can be phased out. Marketing and tea subsidy removal would increase demand on peppermint, thereby helping cut the high tea import and subsidy bills, while luxury-brand tea can be taxed.
Sugar needs attention. Personal intake is high, with onerous imports. Excess is a known cause of widespread obesity, diabetes and tooth decay. Four elements are key. 1) Subsidy reform to curb intake and save plentiful costs, 2) Sugar intake will fall with that of tea, 3) Public awareness campaigns, and high taxes on sweets, would curb excess, 4) Valid concerns exist about synthetic artificial sweeteners, but a very sweet, healthy, fully sugar and calorie-free, natural sweetener is stevia, native to Paraguay. The plant leaves are usable fresh, dried, or as ground, packaged powder, but only in organic form to protect consumers. The plant can grow as a summer crop in the non-Delta northern coastal areas, with their sandier soils and long, sunny and moderately hot days. Stevia has been safely and widely used in Japan since the 1970s, and can be effectively marketed in Egypt as “the sweet leaf”. More interesting still to foreign investors, stevia is climatically less suited to Europe or Arabian Gulf countries, giving an opportunity to market and profitably export stevia to both.
More Reforms
We end with corn and the three edible oils. Corn is Egypt’s top summer crop, grown all along the Nile Valley, with earlier and shorter cultivation cycles in the hotter central and southern Egypt. It is water-sparing and favors fertile soils and hot summers and not cold or salinity. Corn’s top uses are as: 1) Human food, 2) The leaves and stem as livestock feed, 3) In state-subsidized staple baladi bread, and 4) Pressed to yield oil, also state-subsidized. Surprisingly, Egypt imports plentiful corn, while salt in the north will end its growing there. As seen above, lower beef and bread demand would lessen animal feed and corn demand, and hence corn imports and prices. Corn oil subsidy reform and substitutes are also needed, with subsidy phase-out as the substitute oils: sunflower and olive, are more available, leading to moderate, market prices for all three oils. Should Egypt achieve self-sufficiency in corn, fertile land could then be turned over to grow mainly winter vegetable cash crops; exportable to Europe, Asia, and various Arab countries.
Sunflower is another water-efficient summer crop in Egypt, tolerates heat, cooler spells and salinity, and suits both fertile and sandy soils, with the oil a standout, healthier substitute for corn oil. The seeds are tasty, healthy and popular, but mainly used to yield oil, with the stem and head as fine livestock feeds. Plants would best be grown for domestic use in the saltier north (Delta and coast), while oil export potential exists, with harvests earlier than in Europe. Plants can also thrive in Egypt’s very warm winter-graced far south, with timely seed exports to countries with cold, crop-less winters, such as German-speaking Europe where sunflower whole seed bread is popular.
Olive oil is also very healthy and known in Egypt, though pricier and used more by restaurants and upscale citizens, and for table use rather than cooking. Potential exists for more domestic use and exports. Olive trees are salt-tolerant, remarkably weather and drought-hardy, long-living and fruitful, need no irrigation and little care, and suit both fertile and sandier soils in Egypt’s north. A major plus is the limestone content in Egypt’s soils, which is ideal for the trees, giving Egypt the world’s highest yield of olives per hectare; remarkably almost 4 times that of Italy and 15 times that of Tunisia. This is not well-known in Egypt, which consistently rates among the world’s top ten producers of olives despite a very small cultivated area relative to fellow Mediterranean countries.
A special consideration regarding subsidy reform enforcement among Egypt’s working-class society, which is male-dominated, is that the family subsidy be awarded to the mothers, who are known to be more responsible, financially prudent and caring of their children than the fathers, many of whom regrettably may well waste the money on cigarettes, hashish, illicit affairs, or even polygamy. Social workers would need to visit the families and firmly tell the man that should he forcibly try to take the subsidy cash from his wife, family court rulings will sternly punish him. Those quick-procedure courts are needed in Egypt, for firm, decisive police and legal protection of working-class wives vulnerable in such situations. Effective, integrated food strategies can measurably benefit Egypt’s farmers, economy and all citizens alike, with better and healthier dietary options for all Egyptians, especially low-income consumers, plus increased opportunities for exportable cash crops. Reform is long overdue, and can yield rich dividends.
