CAIRO: President Hosni Mubarak has ordered the army-controlled bakeries to raise bread production in an attempt to quell the acute anger over the shortage of subsidized bread.
The order came on the same day that spontaneous protests broke out throughout Fayoum as desperate citizens took to the streets voicing their discontent over the “disappearance” of bread from government bakeries.
“There were violent demonstrations in Sanhour village,” Ahmad Abu Awi, secretary of the Tagammu party in Fayoum told Daily News Egypt. “They broke out outside bakeries when citizens couldn’t buy bread. I live in Abu Saah village in Fayoum and the scenes there weren’t much different.”
“We get our bread from the local ‘family organizations,’ which buy the bread in bulk from the bakery and distribute it from house to house, but recently they have been delivering less and less. We don’t know why, but presume that bakery owners have been selling either the bread or wheat on the black market.”
“These local organizations work as a type of supervision on the bakeries. They should receive an allocated quota of loaves every day from the bakery,” Yehia Mahmoud, media spokesperson for the Ministry of Social Solidarity told Daily News Egypt. He said that if bakeries don’t have enough bread, it only means there are suspicious deals between bakery owners.
“The protests stem from the decision of the governor of Fayoum to take flour away from the subsidized flour shops and instead give it to the bakeries to counteract the bread shortage.
“However, the governor had to cancel this decision because it did not alleviate the problem. Bakery owners would smuggle the flour to the black market. The supervisor comes in the morning, but cannot be there all day, which means flour is often smuggled out in the afternoon,” Mahmoud explained.
In Fayoum, the ministry is in the process of replacing the local organizations with what is called the an Egyptian joint stock company called El Masryeen. The local organizations are only for very remote villages that can’t reach a main bakery. Many of the villages in Fayoum are no longer considered remote. Instead, there will be outlets — as there already are in 6th October and Basatin — which will work as a round-the-clock supervising system, easing up the bread queues but ensuring that the bakery is delivering a certain number of loaves to each outlet every day.”
On Sunday, Mubarak ordered the government to use a portion of its $32 billion foreign reserves to buy wheat from the international market.
However, villagers like Ahmad Abdel Awi are skeptical of the new plans. “It is clear that there is corruption among the inspectors, the bakery owners and officials. This is what needs to be stopped.”
