“Egypt has procured 3.9 million tons of domestic wheat during the current harvest season… [including] 200,000 tons allocated to pasta factories and for seeds,” Reuters reported Kamal Hashim, chairman of the state-run General Company for Silos and Storage, as saying on Sunday.
A few days earlier, the ministries of supply and agriculture announced that the silos of the Ministry of Supply had received 3.4 million tons of homegrown wheat before 7 June.
The statement means Egypt is close to achieving its goal for local wheat for this year after acquiring 90 per cent of the targeted amount of 3.5 million tons, according to Abbas Al-Shinnawi, director of the Agricultural Services Department and responsible for coordinating between the ministries of agriculture and supply.
Egypt’s wheat season began earlier than usual this year in April instead of early May, and it will end by late August instead of in late July.
According to figures from the ministries of supply and agriculture, the season was more than successful, with the country collecting more wheat than it had targeted. The successful harvest came despite the challenges farmers have faced due to the coronavirus lockdowns, disruptions in international supply chains, and the Russia-Ukraine war that broke out on 24 February.
In an attempt to cushion the crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi had instructed the government to increase cash incentives to farmers to encourage them to sell more wheat to the state.
The incentives were meant to make domestic prices as high as the international prices of wheat. They were followed by measures to facilitate the reception of wheat at silos, increasing their working hours to more than 10 hours a day and increasing the number of stations receiving and distributing wheat according to the amount of land planted in each governorate.
Mohamed Al-Kersh, spokesman of the Ministry of Agriculture, said more wheat was still expected from farmers, adding that this season some 3.7 million feddans had been cultivated with wheat, meaning that the harvest will come in at around 10 million tons.
Not all this wheat will be sold to the government, however. The amount the government buys will depend on the capacity of the state’s silos, he noted.
A memorandum by the former legal advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture, quoted in Al-Ahram Weekly, had pointed out that the state had had to intervene to increase incentives to farmers to supply larger quantities of wheat to the government through the management of the bran market.
“The farmer sells half his wheat to the government and retains the other half to half-grind it to use it as fodder for livestock and sheep, saving LE5,750 in the process, which is the price of a ton of bran on the Egyptian market. Bran makes up between 12 and 24 per cent of feed ingredients depending on the age of the livestock,” the memorandum said.
It cited “a report by the agricultural services sector at the Ministry of Agriculture in 2018, which said that wheat supplied by farmers to the Ministry of Supply had decreased by 600,000 tons due to the increase in bran prices that year, so farmers had decided to keep larger quantities of wheat and turn it into fodder to avoid buying bran from the market at high prices.”
The Ministry of Supply took note of the memorandum this year, announcing on 29 May that farmers can buy bran for the subsidised price of LE3,800 per ton for every ardeb of wheat they supply (an ardeb is around 150 kg.)
In recent years, there has been a gap in the amount of wheat the government has said it is expecting and the actual amount it has received.
Part of the problem has been due to bran, while the other part, said Hussein Abu Saddam, head of the Farmers Syndicate, has had to do with a tradition of eating freekeh, a meal in Upper Egypt comprising semi-raw wheat grains.
Freekeh meals consume 20 per cent of the yearly wheat harvest, Abu Saddam noted. He added that farmers keep a portion of the wheat they harvest for household use throughout the year.
This year, the Ministry of Supply announced that punitive measures will be applied to farmers who abstain from selling their wheat to the government, a matter regulated by law since 1993.
The law forbids the selling of wheat to the private sector and obliges farmers to sell their wheat to the Ministry of Supply at prices announced by the government on a yearly basis.
The Interior Ministry has acted to punish violators, and on 7 June it announced it had seized 106,494 tons of local wheat that were being traded illegally in eight cases.
In early June, Minister of Supply Ali Moselhi said that his ministry, in cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture, would conduct an inventory of areas registered with the state that are cultivated with wheat to calculate the quantities supplied by landowners.
If a deficit is noted (less than 12 ardebs per feddan), farmers will be fined LE1,770 (double the price of an ardeb of wheat) for every undelivered ardeb.
The move is supported by Article 6 of a ministerial decree of 29 May. The law also allows the Ministry of Agriculture and the Wheat Receipt Committee of the ministry of supply to issue misdemeanour reports against farmers that refuse to supply wheat to the state.
A version of this article appears in print in the 16 June, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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