CAIRO, Jul 19 (NNN-MENA) – Egypt’s Minister of Supply and Internal Trade, Sherif Farouk, said, the country’s reserve of wheat is enough for 6.9 months.
Farouk said that, this reserve has been secured via the procurement of wheat from local farmers, and the ministry’s recent procurement of 770,000 tonnes of wheat from Bulgaria and Russia, the report said.
He stressed the government’s keenness to continue promoting the strategic reserve of wheat, allocated for producing subsidised bread for six months.
The Egyptian government has quadrupled the subsidised price for the traditional flatbread to 0.2 Egyptian pounds (about 0.0041 U.S. dollars) nationwide, since Jun 1, the first such move in three decades, to alleviate the heavily strained public budget.
For years, nearly 70 million people, or 60 percent of Egypt’s population, counted on the long-running bread subsidy scheme, to fill their stomachs. Before the price hike, the government’s production cost of each loaf was 1.25 pounds.– NNN-MENA