Subsidized Bread Staving Off Starvation & Uprisings.
Written by Asinus Asinum Fricat on April 16, 2008 – 9:14 am -You better get used to this sort of headline. It’s going to get a lot tougher for most of us on this planet. You heard about poor Haitians having to eat mudcakes as “food” of the last resort. Let me give you an account of another country on the brink of disaster: Egypt’s government is now struggling to contain a political crisis as violent clashes have broken out at long lines for subsidized bread, and the president, worried about unrest, has ordered the army to step in to provide more. The president himself had to intervene. You might say, that’s his job. Well, yes, but he is unable to control soaring food prices, none of us can. The Egyptian authorities are fearful that this could be a prelude to a chronic shortage of wheat worldwide and a return to lawlessness.
Nearly 40 percent Egypt’s 76 million people live below or near the poverty line of $2 a day and quite a few on less than a dollar a day. The prices of staples such as cooking oil and rice have nearly doubled in recent months forcing them to ban rice export for a period of six months. 
Tags: Egypt, Food Prices, IMF, Shortages, UN, Wheat Crisis, World Bank
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