JAILHOUSE RAGU
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CAIRO, EGYPT— Hoda El-Sayed is afraid to feed bread to her kids.
The 43-year-old teacher and mother of three has seen news reports that the daily staple sold by Egypt’s state bakeries may cause anything from kidney failure and miscarriages to cancer.
Though spurious, those fears are a problem for a country that spends billions a year subsidizing bread for the poor. They also highlight risks for global traders, who ship more wheat to Egypt than any other nation, as a spat with the government over infected grain morphs into a public health scare.
“I won’t buy any bread from state bakeries until the government makes clear they won’t allow cancer-causing wheat into the country,” said El-Sayed, shopping for groceries in Cairo’s middle-class embassy district of Dokki. Instead, she’s paying five times as much for supermarket loaves.
The origin of her fears, expounded by market-stall shoppers and taxi drivers across the city, lies in arcane and contra- dictory laws passed during the last 15 years that specify levels of fungal contamination allowed in wheat imports.
The result has been chaos in grain markets as traders withdrew from tenders, fearing ships would be rejected at Egyp- tian ports. At home, it sparked a mediafuelled health scare over the naturally occurring ergot fungus that’s potentially toxic when consumed only in much larger quantities over long periods.
Bread is central to Egyptian life. The word “ayesh” in Egyptian means both bread and life. When the country’s citizens rose up against autocrat Hosni Mubarak’s rule in 2011, one of their signature chants was “Bread, freedom and social justice.”
“Wheat is the most essential thing for us,” said Ghada Mohamed, 32, a mother of two shopping in a market in the Sheik Zayed area. “You can mess with vegetables, fruit, even meat and chicken, but you can’t mess with bread.”