Bread, the (subsidized) staff of life in Egypt By Michael Slackman Wednesday, January 16, 2008 c/o IHT

Bread, the (subsidized) staff of life in Egypt
By Michael Slackman

Wednesday, January 16, 2008
CAIRO: "Get out! Get back! Get back! I am not selling to you!" Ibrahim Ali Muhammad, a bread seller, is shouting at his customers. His teeth are brown and misshapen from decay, and he says the stress of his 20 years on the job has given him diabetes. He is standing behind bars, jail-like bars, shouting into a crowd that is pushing, punching, thrusting money at him.

"I already sold to you," he screamed, again, this time distracted by a young man in a blue windbreaker who swiveled on his heels and punched the man behind him.

It is hard to make ends meet in Egypt, where about 45 percent of the population survives on just $2 a day. That is one reason why trying to buy subsidized bread can be a fierce affair, with fists and elbows flying, men shoving and little children dodging blows to get up to the counter.

Egypt also is a state where corruption is widely viewed as systemic, which is also why the crowd gets aggressive trying to buy up the subsidized bread. Cheap state bread can be resold, often for double the original price.

"What has not changed in Egypt for 50 years is not going to change now," Muhammad said, though it was unclear if he meant the chaos in front of him or the cheap bread cooking behind him.

Somehow, much of what ails Egypt seems to converge in the story of subsidized bread. It speaks to a state that is in many ways stuck in the past, struggling to pull itself into the future, unable or unwilling to conquer corruption or even to persuade people to care about one another.

How do you take a broken system that somehow helps feed 80 million people and fix it without causing social disorder? That is a challenge for Egypt at large, and for this little bakery where Muhammad ekes out a living, with a cigarette hanging from his lips and an angry crowd demanding his bread.

Bread, in Egyptian Arabic, is called aish, which literally means life, rather than khobz, the word that other Arab-speakers use. The word reflects the centrality of bread here. This is a culture of bread, not rice, not meat and potatoes, not humus.

Simple, doughy round pockets of bread that look like pita bread but are baladi bread, that is, peasant bread.

"The word, applied to bread, gives this everyday element an almost mystical quality," said Hamdy el-Gazzar, author of "Black Magic," a popular novel recently translated into English. "Egypt's relationship to bread is not one of freedom, but of necessity.

Egypt started subsidizing staples like bread, sugar and tea around World War II. Then when Gamal Abdel Nasser and his military allies overthrew the monarchy, the state leaned heavily on subsidizes to maintain social order and promote a socialist economic model. When the government tried to stop subsidizing bread in 1977, there were riots. Egyptians are generally not known as explosive people, but tell them you are raising the price of bread - of life - and beware.

So the bread subsidy continues, costing Cairo about $3.5 billion a year. Over all, the government spends more on subsidies, including gasoline, than it spends on health and education. But it is not just the cost that plagues the government. The bread subsidy fuels the kind of rampant corruption that undermines faith in government, discourages investment and reinforces the country's every-man-for-himself ethos, say government officials and political experts, not to speak of bakers and their customers.

"The most corrupt sector in the country is the provisions sector," said a government inspector who asked not to be identified for fear of punishment. His job is to go to bakeries to ensure they are actually using the cheap government flour to produce cheap bread that is sold for the proper price. "There is a great deal of corruption. The amount of money in it will make anyone accept to be bribed."

The inspector explained why the system is so open to abuse. The government sells bakeries large bags of flour for 8 pounds, or $1.50. The bakeries are then supposed to sell 20 pieces of bread for 1 pound. At that rate, the baker can make the equivalent of about $10 from each sack. Or the baker can simply sell the flour on the black market for $15.

If the inspector, who said he was paid $42 a month, certifies that after three months the baker has faithfully used the flour to bake bread, the baker gets a refund of about a dollar for every bag of flour he has purchased. A baker who goes through 40 sacks a day over the three-month period gets back around $3,300 - a sum, this inspector said, that could easily be shared with the underpaid inspector (the same one who verified there were no violations).

"I am someone getting 230 pounds for a salary," the inspector said. "Say I want to feed my children three times a day and send them to government schools, to do just that, I need 1,000 pounds a month."

Abdallah Badawy Aboul Magd, the head the Provisions Administration office in Giza, said that the corruption had increased lately because the prices of wheat and other basic foodstuffs have soared. He said that in Giza alone, the governate adjacent to Cairo, there are reports of 2,000 violations a month. To try to combat this problem, he said they have begun a pilot project of separating production from distribution.

"This will enable us to force the bakeries to produce the bread using the complete ration of flour they get," he said.

It is hard to assess actual corruption since corrupt practices are not regularly reported. In a prominent survey that ranks 180 countries by their inhabitants' "perception of corruption," Egypt fell in 2007 to No. 105 from No. 70 the year before.

The Egyptian government has received high praise for its economic changes. Foreign investment has risen sharply, and the World Bank said that gross domestic product grew a healthy 7 percent last year.

But there has been virtually no trickle down, so instead of making life on the streets more stable, the statistically strong economic performance has only made people even more annoyed. A study done this year by a consultant to the Human Development Group of the World Bank lent credence to the widespread feelings of discontent, concluding that overall poverty in 2004-05 "was back to almost the same level as it was in 1995-1996."

"In sum, almost 14 million individuals could not obtain their basic food and nonfood needs," the report noted.

So they fight for cheap bread. They begin gathering outside the bare one-room bakery at about 11 a.m. everyday except Friday, the day of prayer. Over the course of an hour, 14-year-old Mahmoud Ahmed managed four trips to the window. His job, he said, was to ensure a steady stream of bread for a nearby food vendor, who then resold it in sandwiches. It appeared the baker let him push his way to the front to get bread before others. Was there a deal going? Mahmoud would not say.

Down the road, five blocks away, Muhammad Abdul Nabi, 12, was selling bread, the same kind of bread, from a makeshift table for more than double the price of the bakery. There was no line.

Nadim Audi contributed reporting.