02:31

Mass graves dug in besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol as locals bury their dead

Mass graves dug in besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol as locals bury their dead

Well aware of the importance of bread and the unrest that reduced supply of it can provoke, the Egyptian authorities have taken swift action. This has included ensuring that the country keeps its subsidising of bread in place, despite previous pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to drop it.

“Egypt’s food security crisis now poses an existential threat to its economy,” said Professor Michael Tanchum, a non-resident fellow with the Middle East Institute’s economics and energy programme.

“The fragile state of its food security stems from the agricultural sector’s inability to produce enough cereal grains, especially wheat and oilseeds, to meet even half of the country’s domestic demand.”

Tanchum said that Cairo relied on large volumes of heavily subsidised imports to ensure sufficient as well as affordable supplies of bread and vegetable oil for its 105 million citizens.

Russia and Ukraine account for about 30 per cent of the world’s global wheat exports, and Ukraine supplies 15 per cent of corn exports.

Before the war, the two countries supplied more than 80 per cent of Egypt’s wheat needs, according to the US Department of Agriculture. This included private sector purchases, which account for nearly half of total wheat imports. Egypt buys 12 to 13 million tonnes of wheat annually.

The war has disrupted wheat supply and cut off access to affordable wheat from the Black Sea region. To ship most of these commodities, they have to pass through Odesa and other ports on the Black Sea that have been closed to commercial use since many European countries imposed sanctions on Russia over its invasion.

The Egyptian government has moved to forestall a food crisis by diversifying its import sources and buying from local farmers to ensure it maintains its supply of subsidised bread, which is vital for more than 70 million Egyptians in low-to-middle-income families. The subsidised small flat loaves sell for about 1 US cent each.

On Monday, the government also fixed the price of unsubsidised bread – known locally as “tourist bread”.

“Even if the bread price can be fixed, other items in the household shopping trolley will still become more expensive,” said François Conradie, lead political economist at Oxford Economics Africa. “That come especially through the effects of higher prices of fuel – subsidies having been slashed as part of reforms agreed with the IMF – and corn, which is used as feed across the agricultural sector.”

Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly set the price for commercial bread at 11.50 Egyptian pounds (62 cents) per kg. The country has also said that it will seek the commodity from alternative markets including India, the United States, Argentina and Paraguay to meet its needs.

The government is aiming to buy 6 million tonnes of wheat from local farmers, which is equivalent to 60 per cent of the expected harvest, and this month has imposed a three-month ban on the export of wheat, beans, lentils, flour and pasta.

However, the US agriculture department’s Foreign Agricultural Service has said that, even with additional measures to diversify its wheat supply, “rising global prices will impede Egypt’s ability to purchase large volumes of wheat from international sources”.

Egypt’s state buyer had launched two tenders to import wheat but it last month cancelled them after it did not attract firms that could bring in the commodity. It also blamed the failure of the tender on high bid prices. Currently, the government’s wheat reserves for the food subsidy programme account for 4.5 months of consumption.

Similarly, in other North African nations, governments are taking steps to avert the threat of food scarcity. Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has banned the export of any food products that contain imported ingredients, and directed the justice minister to prepare a bill to enforce the ban.

In Morocco, the government has promised subsidies to transport operators, who recently went on strike to protest against fuel price increases, according to Conradie of Oxford Economics Africa.

The potential consequences are visible elsewhere in the region – such as in Yemen, on the Arabian Peninsula, where there has been fighting between government forces and separatists.

The World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations’ food assistance branch, last week warned that 17.4 million Yemenis were classed as “food insecure” – lacking access to affordable food in sufficient quantities – with an additional 1.6 million expected to fall into “emergency levels of hunger” by the end of the year.

The WFP said it was likely that the number of people experiencing catastrophic or famine-like levels of hunger would grow fivefold by December, from 31,000 now to 161,000.

“These harrowing figures confirm that we are on a countdown to catastrophe in Yemen and we are almost out of time to avoid it,” WFP executive director David Beasley said.

‘There will be trouble’: global fertiliser shortage stirs food fears in China

Drought-hit South Sudan is bracing for its worst ever hunger. The WFP said that “a hidden hunger emergency” was unfolding there while the world’s attention was focused on Ukraine, forecasting that 8.3 million people would face extreme hunger in the coming months.

The Ukraine war has worsened the food situation in both of those countries.

Egypt is not alone; many countries in Africa are heavily dependent on Ukrainian and Russian wheat, sunflower oil, and fertiliser or chemicals for their manufacture.

With Russia being the world’s second largest exporter of oil, the latest sanctions have sent international crude prices soaring and forced non-oil-producing countries to spend much more to buy petroleum. Observers say that although oil-producing countries such as Angola, the Republic of Congo and Algeria could benefit from higher prices, any gain could be wiped out by the increased cost of imports.

Millions in Africa, especially the Horn of Africa, face severe hunger because of a worsening drought that recently prompted China to provide emergency food aid to countries including Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Djibouti.

Again, the Ukraine invasion has only made the situation worse by pushing up prices of wheat and corn. Most of the wheat that Africa consumes is imported, according to emerging and frontier markets-focused investment bank Renaissance Capital.

Mohammed Soliman, a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said that sanctions against Russia raised a concern for many countries that had to balance their national interests between alignments with Washington and Moscow. But he said Russia’s economic bandwidth in Africa was extremely limited.

01:26

Faces of the exodus: fear and anguish as more than 3 million Ukrainians flee Russian invasion

Faces of the exodus: fear and anguish as more than 3 million Ukrainians flee Russian invasion

“The massive impact of sanctions on the Russian economy is a clear display of Western geopolitical power via economic statecraft, and we will see an even more limited Moscow,” he said.

This would not necessarily be compensated for by China, he said, with China and Russia having differing objectives in Africa.

“China’s policies under the Belt and Road Initiative seek to invest in infrastructure development and aggregation of natural resources,” Soliman said. “China will not be able to fill the Russian gap.”

Paul Stronski, a senior fellow with the Russia and Eurasia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that the situation in Ukraine could cause a humanitarian crisis in the north of Africa.

“Ukraine won’t be able to plant or export this year, and Russian ports are in a de facto embargo, with few insurers willing to insure ships [from non-sanctioning countries] going into the Black Sea now,” Stronski said. “So Russia also will have difficulties shipping wheat overseas this year.”

He said that a supply shortage would drive grain and food prices up. “Given droughts in parts of Africa, this is a troubling scenario in multiple spots that have had political instability over high fuel and food prices,” Stronski said.

“Price hikes for basic foods, supply interruptions, local droughts and existing political instability – it’s a potentially toxic combination.”