Dozens of Egyptian farmers staged a demonstration on Tuesday in front of the Armant Sugar Factory in the Upper Egyptian Luxor governorate to protest the authorities’ failure to implement their longstanding demand to raise sugar cane prices to LE400 per tonne.

Rushdi Abou El-Wafa, head of the Egyptian Farmers Syndicate in Luxor, complained that the per-ton prices at which farmers currently sell sugar cane to sugar-processing factories – which generally don’t exceed LE300 – are not enough to cover costs associated with harvesting the crop.

Protesting farmers also demanded that their outstanding debts to the Egyptian Agricultural Bank be written off, threatening to block the Cairo-Aswan road in the event that their demands weren’t met by authorities.