Bread subsidies

By Samir Sobhi

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Bread made it into many of our old sayings. Consider for example, "a hungry man dreams of the bread market," or "no one sleeps without dinner," or "it's all bread, so why fret?" When Minister of Social Solidarity Ali Moselhi berated what he called the bread mafia, all these sayings came back to me. The minister had a plan to solve the bread problem. He calculated the cost and price of bread and devised a formula that ensures a fair profit to bakers. His plan had one flaw. It didn't anticipate the steep rise in wheat prices that followed.

So now we have bread selling at anywhere between five and 50 piastres. Some supplies are subsidised; some are less so. And yet we have an army of bread inspectors running around in town, doing what exactly?

Let's admit that subsidies no longer work. We have private bakeries using subsidised flour. And these bakeries are monitored by bread inspectors. Is not this a recipe for disaster? One solution is to turn the bakeries into share-holding companies so that at least the public has a stake in the ensuing scam.

I will tell you how the scam works. Someone owns a bakery. He receives the subsidised flour and is supposed to sell his bread at subsidised prices. But if he is smart, he won't. He would sell most of the flour to non-subsidised bakeries and pocket the money. How does he do that? Simple. Work slowly, claim that the machine is broken; tell inspectors that the electricity was off. At the end of the day, a baker can make up to LE7,000 by selling the flour rather than the bread.

Bread subsidies now stand at LE10 billion a year. This is a lot of dough, literally. So here is an idea. Why don't we give this money straight to the consumers? Forget about the poor-rich division for now. Just give the money to everyone. Give it to every man, woman and child in this country and we'll all be better off.

This week's Soapbox speaker is deputy editor-in- chief of Al-Ahram .