SWEET AGONY
In a country addicted to sugar, a shortage shakes Egypt,
CAIRO— Egyptians pile sugar into mugs of tea by the spoonful — or three or five. A staple long subsidized by the government for most of the population, sugar is the chief ingredient of the national pudding, Om Ali. It can feel like the only ingredient. It is also a prime reason that nearly a fifth of Egyptians have diabetes.
So a weeks-long sugar shortage has plunged people into a panic. The sugar crisis, as it is known, has quickly become shorthand for the brewing anger against President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi’s management of the economy and his overall rule.
“The people are going to snap,” Ahmad el-Gebaly said as he turned away customers seeking sugar he did not have at his subsidized-goods store in Bulaq, a working-class neighbourhood of Cairo. “Nobody can stand him anymore,” he added of el-Sissi.
Still reeling from the political turbulence and militant attacks that followed the 2011 uprising, Egypt’s economy is in free fall. Its pound is now worth15 cents (Canadian) on the black market, about half its value a year ago.
Tourism has collapsed, remittances from Egyptian workers in the Persian Gulf have dropped and revenue from the Suez Canal has fallen. Inflation reached a seven-year high of 15.5 per cent in August. Saudi Arabia delayed a shipment of discount petroleum products this month, setting off fears of a deteriorating relationship with an ally that has propped up Egypt with more than $33 billion since el-Sissi came to power in 2014.
Sugar is not the only scarce staple, as the plummeting pound has slashed Egypt’s import-purchasing power. Cooking oil disappeared from shelves for a time this year, residents said, as did baby formula. Rice is also in low supply. Some complained that they could not find certain medicines.
El-Sissi, under pressure to overhaul the economy, has been blamed for the shortages in subsidized sugar and other products that Egyptians have relied on since the First World War. He reduced the subsidies’ share of the budget this year by 14 per cent, to about $11.7 billion, according to the government-run news website Ahram Online. These cuts and other actions were “inevitable to save the economic situation,” elSissi said in a recent interview with a state-owned newspaper. He described the current situation as a “bottleneck” and promised, “We are on our way out.”
But people are not patient. They are desperate. The official price for sugar is more than 33 cents per kilogram, up from 13 cents two years ago, and on the black market it goes for triple that. Small shops ran out of sugar weeks ago, and upscale markets are rationing it to one kilogram per person.
The government created a hotline for residents to report hoarders and police arrested a man for pos- session of10 kilograms of sugar, the Egyptian state news media reported.
“It is the worst shortage I can remember in my lifetime,” said H.A. Hellyer, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, a research organization based in Washington. “I think what everybody is worried about is a repeat of the 1977 bread riots.”
Hellyer was referring to the nationwide protests that followed attempts by Anwar Sadat, then the president, to dismantle the subsidy system. It was the only attempt, said Amro Ali, an associate professor of sociology at American University in Cairo. The subsidies, he added, were untouchable.
Today, 88 per cent of Egyptians — about 80 million people — can buy subsidized food through government-issued electronic cash cards. In a country where a quarter of the population lives in poverty and millions of workers barely have enough for basic expenses, the cards are a lifeline. The government also subsidizes water, electricity and gas for all.
Ahmed Kamal, an aide to the minister responsible for the subsidies, blamed the private sector, a scarcity of Egyptian hard currency and rising global prices for the sugar shortage. He said that private importers were expected to bring in some of the 800,000 tons of sugar that Egypt must purchase from abroad annually, about a quarter of the nation’s yearly demand for 3.2 million tons, but that the country had fallen short of its goal this year. Kamal said the problem had been exacerbated by business owners hoarding supplies and by the news media whipping up angst. He added that the government still had a four-month supply of sugar.
But little of it was available in Bulaq, the Cairo neighbourhood where el-Gebaly’s shop was the only subsidized grocery reliably open — and he mostly turned people away. Residents said that the other six shops in the neighbourhood that were licensed to sell subsidized goods had closed to avoid a police crackdown, but that they sometimes opened after hours to sell sugar illegally. For Sumaya Oweis, 37, like many residents, the sugar shortage came after months of growing hardship. Her husband, an itinerant worker, struggled to make $2 a day, she said. They are eating less because they cannot keep up with rising prices for food.
Meanwhile, her subsidized birth-control pills had disappeared off the shelves for a few weeks this year. When they returned to the market, Oweis said, the price for a month’s supply had increased to $2 from $1.30.
Perhaps the shortage of sugar is somewhat of a blessing, given Egypt’s problems with obesity and diabetes, wrote Mohammed Nosseir, a liberal politician.
The shortage, “estimated at 80 per cent, probably represents the amount of sugar we need to reduce in terms of consumption,” Nosseir wrote in an editorial in Daily News Egypt. “If they consume reasonable amounts, Egyptians could easily afford to purchase unsubsidized sugar.”