Egypt: bread shortages, hunger and unrest

Source: Guardian UK

Chris McGreal
Tuesday May 27 2008

Hoda al-Latif and the son she describes as "ill in the head" have long relied on the comfort of friends and neighbours. Sympathisers paid the rent on a cramped flat in the rundown east side of Cairo and picked up extra meat at the butchers for the near destitute widow and 25-year-old Ahmed, who the government classifies as mentally handicapped.

Ahmed sells biscuits from a street stall and his customers often slipped him a little extra cash to help out. It all added up, and the al-Latifs sometimes found themselves with enough to pass on the surplus to others in need.

No more. The neighbours plead that they can barely feed their own families these days and rarely buy meat for themselves. Ahmed's customers no longer stop to buy biscuits let alone give him money. Even their landlady says she has largely given up eating dinner.

"People have always helped us. They did it out of respect for my dead husband," said Hoda al-Latif. "But with the price rises people don't help any more. We never have meat now. Some days we just make do with bread and herbs."



Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/27/food.egypt?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnews

available or is that too become too expensive

of U.S. foreign aid - about $2 billion per year. Sadly the corrupt dictatorship we sponsor there uses most of it to buy military hardware from U.S. defense contractors. In fact, much of the "aid" money never leaves the U.S. at all.

But at least the Egyptians carry our water in the Middle East. As long as they continue to do that what's a few starving peasants? :sarcasm:

And shoot a few as examples

That will please Gangster Cheney and his cronies

...that as OPEC increases the cost of a barrel of oil, they are also creating popular unrest and giving fanatical clerics a platform in their own countries?

There is a saying in Cairo: nobody dies of hunger in Egypt. But now many of those who rarely took into account the cost of food are going hungry as surging oil and crop prices drive up the price of staples such as rice and pasta. That in turn has forced up demand for heavily subsidised goods - particularly very cheap bread - not just among the half of the population that lives on less than £1 a day, like the al-Latifs, but those further up the social scale.

Ask who is responsible for all this, and the answer is an evasive: "You know who."

"People are going crazy," said al-Latif. "They are really angry over these prices and they complain among themselves but you have to be careful. My son was on a bus and he started screeching about the prices. Everyone told him to shut up and stop talking. They said that the day before there was a guy complaining and they arrested him and blindfolded him and took him away. There's a saying here, that you disappear behind the sun. People are angry but they are scared."

The government's opponents tried to capitalise on the food crisis by calling strikes and mass protests in Cairo last month and early May. Mubarak sought to undermine them by announcing a 30% pay rise from July for all public sector workers. That went some way to satisfying a large section of a disgruntled working population. But days after the protests passed, the government announced a 35% increase in the price of several goods. People said they had been duped.

"We heard from the president's speech that they would take from the pockets of the rich and put into the pot of the poor but then we heard the prices have gone up," said al-Latif. The protests were in part organised through emails, text messaging and the internet. Three days after the May 4 strike, Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, a 27-year-old civil engineer who used his Facebook site to promote the protest, was snatched from the street by the interior ministry's state security investigations department. He was blindfolded, taken to a police station, stripped naked and beaten for 12 hours. He was released without charge but warned not to cause more trouble.

A more seasoned protest leader, George Ishak, who heads the Kifaya coalition of leftwing civic groups, was also arrested, held for three days and banned from leaving the country. "They put me in a room without anything. No food, no water. They record my calls. They played them back to me. I was accused of inciting. I told them the real inciters are poverty and unemployment. I was lucky. Younger activists are physically abused, beaten up," he said.

Hovering in the background is the Muslim Brotherhood. The food crisis should have provided the banned Islamist party with a rallying point in its demand for free elections, but the group has failed to capitalise on the crisis.One of the group's leaders, Essam El-Erian, denies the Muslim Brotherhood was holding back and said the food crisis will prove destabilising. "What is given by the right hand is taken by the left. People are furious at this deceit," he said. "Corruption means the rich will be more rich and the poor will be more poor. You can't predict the reaction of the poor. Socially it will take away the middle class. It has been gradually disappearing for 10 years. They will join the poor."

So who will pressure the government, if not the people? "The only power is the army. We are against a coup d'etat. It is very dangerous for the future but right now it is difficult to see who else can change things," Erian added.

- Yep, http://www.opec.org/home/">OPEC....

Marx was one of the first historians to point out that revolutions do NOT occur as things go bad, but after the situation has bottomed out and the economy starts to improve. For example the worse year for France was 1787, but the French Revolution did not occur till 1789. The worse year for the Russians in WWI, was 1916, but BOTH Russian Revolutions were in 1917. Both revolutions occurred as things started to improve. Once people no longer have to worry about where their next meal is, they revolt to make sure they never have to face the same problem again.

This explains the Moslem Brotherhood decision to wait, things will get worse. When the Brotherhood moves it will be after things have bottomed out. Thus my comment that someone in the Moslem Brotherhood has read Marx (P.S. so has the CIA, they also aim for a revolution as things bottom out and start to improve NOT as things go downhill).

between "fanatical clerics" as you call them, and nationalist anti-imperial and anti-dictatorship movements. Because we support and encourage regimes that stifle all democratic dissent, the only outlets for popular opposition end up being the Islamic religious groups. We have created this dynamic. If we used even a tiny bit of our $2 billion Dollar leverage over Egypt to actually pressure them to democratize we might see the rise of more palatable opposition elements.

Because of the climate we have created in the Middle East with our support for tyrants, we are stuck tolerating somewhat radical Islamist leadership - at least for a while - if we ever really want the region to democratize (see: Hamas victory, etc.). But right now neither Party in the U.S. supports actual democratization in the ME, so it's kind of a moot point.

I mean... the US alone produces ENOUGH FOOD FOR THE WORLD!!!!!
How the HELL is this even POSSIBLE
With Holland even producing (they say) FAR more then enough food to feed the world, HOW IS THIS KIND OF THING EVEN POSSIBLE!>!!>?
i really don't understand how Europe and the us can allow this.

climate change weather is ruining food crops in every country of the world. there is a continous growing food shortage

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/2/9/211544/4045

Apparently it has been for a couple of years now already.

Given the low price for grain, and the much higher price for processed grain (i.e Flour or Noddles) the US imports higher value items of food then we export. Canada is almost as bad, exporting more Grain into the US then it imports back. Add to the problem of grains, the imports of the Cheese and fruits (i.e. Grapes from Chile during the Northern Winter Months) all of which have much higher value, you quickly see the import surplus is NOT Food items, but in value of those items.