It is a hot and busy summer afternoon in Cairo, and Mahmoud, a 55-year-old taxi driver, is acting irritably. He is yelling at other drivers while complaining about “not having had a cigarette since this morning”.
“My head will split. This is too much. I have been trying to buy a pack of cigarettes since the morning, but things have been insane,” he said.
Mahmoud has been having trouble buying his usual two packs of Cleopatra Super, the 94 mm 20-cigarette soft pack that he usually consumes over half a week now that he has reduced his intake of nicotine on doctor’s orders following a diagnosis with Covid-19 a couple of years ago.
It has been 40 years since Mahmoud picked up smoking from friends at school, and ever since it has been mostly Cleopatra cigarettes that he has smoked.
“It was an affordable cigarette when we were young, so we could buy four or five cigarettes a day,” he said. “It was also the cigarette that our parents smoked, so we used to steal one or two from their packs every once in a while, until we would get caught that is,” he added with a big smile.
Over the years, Mahmoud has been introduced to other types of cigarettes, both cheaper and more expensive. He liked some of the more expensive ones, “but just for special occasions.”
“I never abandoned Cleopatra, as you know that smoking is mostly an acquired taste,” he added.
Today, Mahmoud finds it really annoying that he cannot find his regular brand of cigarettes. During an hour of driving from eastern to northern Cairo, he stopped at every kiosk on the road to try to buy “at least one cigarette”.
“A smoker who is deprived of cigarettes for a long time is bound to be in a foul mood, and I already have to put up with traffic jams,” he said.
Just as Mahmoud was getting desperate, his mobile phone beeped. “Someone at Bab Al-Bahr found me two packs at a reasonable price, only five pounds more than the regular price,” he said.
“The prices of cigarettes have been going up over and over again during the past five years. Everything has become a lot more expensive,” he lamented, as he dialled the number of the person to inform them that he would head straight to Bab Al-Bahr, also in northern Cairo, in a few minutes.
Located about a quarter of an hour’s drive from the Railway Station in Ramses Square, Bab Al-Bahr is a wholesale market for cigarettes. However, over the past few months, with an acute crisis in the availability of cigarettes, both local and international brands, it has become a meeting point for agents and dealers who will provide machine-rolled cylinders of tobacco for those who are willing to pay the price.
This is decided per pack and varies from one brand to another. According to smokers who have frequented Bab Al-Bahr, either independently or through contact, it depends on the quantity requested and the profile of the purchaser.
“It really depends. If you are buying a sealed package of 10 packs, for example, you are more likely to pay a higher price because this indicates that you are in a decent financial situation and a heavy smoker dependent on a pack a day at least,” said Nagi, a pharmacist who gets his cigarettes from Bab Al-Bahr through a contact.
Nagi himself does not go to Bab Al-Bahr. Instead, he knows someone who goes there to get cigarettes for a group of people in a messaging group. “Every week, each of us places our requests. He makes individual replies with the expected price but doesn’t commit to it as things can change fast,” Nagi said.
Once he has the packs, there are two ways to deliver. The most common is for the contact to send someone to deliver them and give the price as finally indicated in a private message plus the contact’s rate, usually five to 10 per cent of the parcel’s cost plus a tip for the delivery person at “a flat rate of LE50”.
All this can take the price of a pack of cigarettes to over 90 per cent above its official price.
For this group of mostly well-off people, it is worth their while given that their contact, unlike those of some other groups, has never failed to deliver the required brands in the required quantities.
“Obviously this means he pays his way through the black market,” Nagi said.
REPLACEMENTS
Maher, a Cairo banker, has had to replace his daily intake of one pack of a famous US brand with another brand produced by a mostly Japanese-owned company.
“It is odd that there are specific brands that are suffering the most from shortages. These include Cleopatra, the most famous Egyptian cigarette, and some other brands that are very popular in Egypt and that are produced through the same company,” he said.
According to Maher, it is equally odd that the increased prices include brands that are not particularly popular among Egyptian smokers and are consumed as substitutes for preferred brands.
“The prices go up and down and then up again. Since the crisis started a few months ago, they have kept saying that the prices will stabilise, but this has never happened,” he said.
For Maher, Nagi, Mahmoud and other smokers who shared their woes on the cigarette crisis, there is also something odd about this happening in a country that has had a cigarette industry for a very long time.
It was sometime in the early decades of the 17th century that tobacco first found its way to Egypt, and the planting of tobacco was established in the country by the early 19th-century ruler Mohamed Ali.
Later, the khedive Tawfik decided to suspend its planting, since this had never really produced prime-quality tobacco due to the climate, to allow for the expansion of cotton. However, by that time there was already an established industry of cigarette-making that was dominated by Armenians and Greeks living in Egypt.
It took a while for smoking cigarettes to pick up with Egyptians, but by the late 19th century it was a habit adopted by many. King Fouad ordered the launch of the Eastern Company for Cigarettes and Tobacco in July 1920, and this eventually brought together several manufacturers.
With the nationalisation orders in the 1960s, most independent Armenian and Greek manufacturers sold their assets, allowing the Eastern Company to expand and control a bigger share of the market, especially after the production of the first version of Cleopatra in 1961.
It did not take long before this was a hit in a society that was turning its back on imports and becoming committed to a made-in-Egypt lifestyle.
According to Morsi Abu Amer, head of communications at the Eastern Company for Cigarettes and Tobacco, Cleopatra is the uncontested queen brand produced by his company. It produces other brands of cigarettes, cigarillos, cigars and a wide range of tobacco for shishas, pipes, and roll-your-own cigarettes. But Cleopatra gets the most attention from consumers, both in Egypt and in export destinations in the Arab Gulf countries where large Egyptian expatriate communities live and work.
Over the past six decades, there have been many parallel versions of Cleopatra, Abu Amer said, which was first produced to impress Egypt’s former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser and lure him away from his favourite long-length US cigarettes.
“The company opted to cater for the diverse tastes of its consumers by offering different packages, light versions, and so on,” he said.
This has helped Cleopatra to continue to be the preferred cigarette of most Egyptian smokers. “Some think that the domination of Cleopatra relates to its price, but it is not just about that. It is also about the taste that people have got used to. Cleopatra is an essential part of the smoking culture in Egypt,” Abu Amer said.
Cleopatra and allied products today amount to close to two-thirds of the consumption of Egypt’s 18 million smokers. The rest of the market is divided between Philip Morris, which announced in August last year that it would be writing “Made in Egypt by UTC” on packets of Marlboro, Merit and L&M cigarettes to stand for the United Tobacco Company that came into existence last year to produce some of the world’s biggest brands in Egypt, and Japan Tobacco International.
In addition, there are steady but not sizable imports of cigarettes, e-cigarettes that have come into fashion during the past decade, and roll-your-own-cigarettes and heated tobacco products that have found their way among Egyptian smokers over the past few years.
But it is still Cleopatra that tops the market in Egypt. “We produce an average of 100 to 120 million cigarettes a day, and in view of the complaints of the past few months the company has decided to increase its daily production of cigarettes to 150 million,” Abu Amer said.
A CURIOUS CRISIS
Last month, in press statements made at the peak of the crisis, Ibrahim Imbabi, chair of the tobacco section of the Manufacturers Union, appealed for parliament to suspend its summer recess in order to discuss the acute shortage of cigarettes.
Imbabi blamed wholesale traders for the crisis and called on the state to intervene. His call came as consumers were complaining about an acute shortage of cigarettes, especially Cleopatra.
However, Hani Aman, chair of the Eastern Company for Cigarettes and Tobacco, said there was no shortage and that the company’s decision to increase production was designed to combat “the greedy schemes of traders who have been stocking up in anticipation of an upcoming increase in the pricing of cigarettes.”
This complaint was at least partially rejected by Hassan, the owner of a tobacco store in Downtown Cairo. “The problem is not with the wholesale traders so much as with the source — the producers,” Hassan said.
“There has been a lot of speculation in the market since United Tobacco took over Philip Morris last year, especially as this came with an increase in prices and a drop in supplies to the market,” he said.
He added that when he was talking to the wholesale trader he has been dealing with for over 20 years, he learned that supplies were down and that queries to the company were not met with satisfactory answers. The production of Cleopatra had been negatively influenced as United was negotiating taking over a share of the Eastern Company.
A source close to United said that it is planning to take over a share of Eastern Company as part of a plan to sell off state assets to increase the availability of foreign currency.
Today, the Holding Chemical Company owns 51 per cent of the shares in the Eastern Company. An investment fund and a union of workers and employees in the company own close to another 15 per cent. The rest of the company’s shares are available for sale on the stock market.
According to the same source, United is planning to buy close to 35 per cent of the 51 per cent that the Holding Chemical Company owns, and the 15 per cent that is owned by the investment fund and the company’s union of workers and employees, along with some of the shares on the stock market.
The plan is for United, “essentially a group of investors from the Gulf and a few Egyptians”, to own most of the Eastern Company with a plan to upgrade its production.
“There has been a lot of speculation in the market, and this has prompted wholesale traders to exercise caution and to try to protect their interests, especially in view of the speculation that once the United takeover is complete, this will change the operations of the supplies in a way that might exclude some of the current traders,” Hassan said.
“We don’t really know how much of this speculation is true,” and this is contributing to a crisis that is touching a product “that is essential for consumers,” he added.
DANGERS
“A cigarette and a cup of tea in the middle of the day is all that I have left in terms of pleasure, now that the increasing prices of everything else have deprived me of everything that I used to have access to before the soaring prices of the past five years,” Mahmoud, the taxi driver, said.
“I cannot have a summer vacation by the sea as I used to. I cannot take the family for a day out. I barely buy fruit, and when I do, I don’t take much to leave the rest for the kids. What do I have left if I am deprived of the pleasure of a cup of tea and a cigarette,” he asked.
Mahmoud is not willing to listen to what he calls “the annoying arguments” on some radio and TV programmes about the need for smokers to benefit from the current crisis to quit smoking.
Mahmoud, Maher, and Nagi agreed that a decision to quit smoking could not be prompted by a market crisis. “Everyone knows the side effects of smoking, and they are written on every single box of cigarettes,” Maher said.
In 2005, a new law forced all cigarette manufacturers to stamp every box sold in Egypt with a warning of the effects of smoking, including premature aging, heart disease, cancer, impotence, and more.
“Smoking kills” is also stamped on some boxes of cigarettes under the picture of a dying man. The changes came when Egypt joined an international treaty to work on reducing all types of smoking by 30 per cent by 2050.
It was the most radical anti-smoking move taken since a 1981 law banned the showing of advertisements for cigarettes on TV or publicity in the papers. This was part of a world awareness campaign that interrupted the trend among film stars to appear in advertisements for smoking.
Over the past few years, there has been accelerated demand by the Egyptian Association for Combating Smoking, TB, and Chest Diseases to prohibit scenes of smoking in all cinema and drama productions in Egypt and to show a warning of the effects of smoking every time an actor or actress appears while doing so.
The association has warned that every year 170,000 people in Egypt die as a result of smoking.
While the government has allocated a hot line (16805) for smokers who wish to get help to quit, the association says that it needs to do a lot more in terms of anti-smoking campaigning, including putting higher taxes on manufacturers with the money raised going to hospitals that treat problems caused by smoking.
According to Abu Amer, the Eastern Company is committed to increasing its donations to government hospitals that treat heart disease and cancer. However, he said that any change in the tax system would impact the pricing system that has already been influenced by the repeated devaluations of the Egyptian pound in view of the fact that Egypt is a net importer of tobacco.
“A continued crisis in the cigarette market or continued hikes of the prices of cigarettes is a serious problem because it causes a lot of public anger,” said one MP speaking on condition of anonymity.
“At a sensitive moment in the current economic crisis the last thing that the government needs is to make moves that would increase public anger. If the government wants to cut down the number of smokers in Egypt, it needs to run awareness campaigns, not promote an exaggerated increase in prices.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 31 August, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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