East Oweinat, 500 km southwest of Lake Nasser, is Egypt's second largest wheat production project.
Egypt needs more agricultural research to produce high-quality crops meeting international standards, the president said.
"We are happy to fulfil dreams that have been aspired to for years," El-Sisi said, adding that challenges had hindered progress.
Furthermore, the government aims to increase East Oweinat's population to work and live there, the president continued.
El-Sisi noted that developing a plan to relocate citizens from densely populated areas in the Nile Delta and Upper Egypt to East Oweinat was extremely important.
He stated that it was also important to attract investors to new parts of the country and to increase the population density in the new residential communities.
Furthermore, the president stressed that experts had to conduct research and studies to increase Egypt’s agricultural production in a way that meets market needs.
El-Sisi added that the infrastructure necessary for cultivation has been completed and that henceforward businessmen and investors can invest in agriculture.
During the inauguration, he also inspected a potato processing factory in East Oweinat.
The factory is erected on an area of 70 feddans and includes 32 storage areas with a capacity of 64,000 tons.
It has a production line for mashed potatoes, with a capacity of 10 tons, and a large refrigerator for storing nearly 6,000 tons of potatoes.
For his part, Minister of Agriculture El-Sayed El-Quseir said Egypt's agriculture exports were not affected by the Russian-Ukrainian crisis, adding that the country produced 6.5 million tons of fresh potatoes over the past year for the first time.
El-Quseir stated that Russia imported 380,000 tons of potatoes from Egypt in 2023, compared to 270,000 tons of potatoes in 2022.
The minister also updated the president on a sunflower cultivation project that aims to increase Egypt's production of sunflower oil.
El-Sisi affirmed that following the cultivation of these lands Egypt will grow one million tons of wheat using modern irrigation systems.
He stressed the importance of water conservation and its efficient use in agriculture according to modern standards.
East Oweinat has cultivated 146,000 feddans so far and aims to harvest 30,000 feddans of wheat as well as other strategic crops this season, said Tawfik Sami, chairman of the National Company for Land Reclamation and Agriculture in East Oweinat.
Sami said that 460,000 feddans had been reclaimed by the end of 2022 to increase the area of the country’s agricultural land.
He highlighted that 190,000 of those feddans have been cultivated in East Oweinat in two stages.
In the first stage, spanning the years 1999 and 2012, 80,000 feddans were reclaimed in the area designated as “Oweinat 1”.
In the second stage, spanning the years 2014 and 2022, a further 110,000 feddans were added to the cultivated zone in the areas designated as "Oweinat 2" and "Oweinat 3", Sami explained.
He also noted that over 20,000 new feddans have been cultivated in El-Farafra and Ein Dalla regions.
East Oweinat is a project that aims to reclaim more than 186,000 feddans of desert land.
The purpose of the project, which started in the New Valley Governorate, is to produce an annual three million tons of various kinds of agricultural crops, including wheat.
Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, has intensified its efforts over the past years to increase its wheat cultivated land plots to reduce the import bill.
Reducing wheat imports became essential after the war between Russia and Ukraine, which has disrupted supply chains, broke out in February 2022.
Egypt imported 80 percent of its wheat from both Russia and Ukraine.
In January, Egypt announced that it aims to procure four million tons of local wheat in the current season, which began in April. This number is down from 4.2 million tons it procured in 2022, 1.8 million tons short of its initial target.
The country increased its wheat procurement price by 20 percent. The price hence rose from EGP 1,250 per ardeb (150 kg) to EGP 1,500 ($83) per ardeb in April.
The new price hence constituted an incentive to farmers to sell wheat to the government to meet local demand.
Egypt spends tens of billions of pounds annually to secure nearly 20 million tons of local and imported wheat.
Wheat is a key strategic commodity for the production of loaves of bread; it is a staple of everyday diet and cuisine for tens of millions of Egyptians.
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