Five Loaves a Day on a Cairo Ration Card — Epoche B1
At a bakery in Cairo the queue moves by smart card: the Tamween ration card, which entitles each registered person to five loaves of subsidised baladi bread a day. I stood in that queue on a hot morning. A man taps his card on a small grey machine, the machine agrees, and the flat brown loaves come out through the window on a wooden tray, still too hot to stack. In June 2024 the price of that loaf rose from five piastres to twenty. It was the first increase in about thirty years. Twenty piastres is still a fraction of what the wheat, the flour and the fuel cost to produce it, so the state pays the difference on every loaf, every day, for tens of millions of people. Both directions of the bargain were visible from where I stood. Nobody at that counter goes without bread; a family that has lost its income this month still eats, and the queue does not ask why you are in it. Egyptians call this bread aish, which is also the everyday word for life, and nobody waiting there thinks that is a coincidence. And the other direction. When bread costs less than the grain inside it, the loaf stops being only food. Cheap loaves are bought and fed to animals, because as feed they are a bargain. The subsidy meant to keep a man from hunger ends in a goat's trough, and the bill still arrives at the treasury the next morning. I left with two loaves I had not queued for, pressed on me by the man in front. That is the other thing the subsidy pays for, and no ministry counts it. References Sdralevich, C., Sab, R., Zouhar, Y. and Albertin, G. (2014). Subsidy Reform in the Middle East and North Africa: Recent Progress and Challenges Ahead. International Monetary Fund. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2024). GIEWS Country Brief: Egypt. FAO.