Are Rising Food Prices in Egypt a Taste of the Future?

Food prices in Egypt rose 16.8% over the past year resulting in mass protests, reports the Economist. Thousands of textile workers in Mahalla al-Kabra have been protesting on and off since late 2006, and now professors and professionals are joining in. This is undoubtedly a worrisome trend for a nation that expects its population to grow by more than 50% by 2050, rising from its current 80 million to roughly 126 million people. The problem does not lend itself to easy solutions. A significant cause of the price increases is a general rise in international commodity prices. Combine Egypt’s lack of control over this international inflation with the fact that it is the world’s largest food importer, and you have a structural dilemma that will challenge Egypt’s leadership for some time to come.

Egypt is the world's largest

Submitted by on Tue, 03/25/2008 - 9:42am.

Egypt is the world's largest food importer? Huh, didn't realize that. I would have figured they'd still be able to get a fair amount of agriculture out of the Nile valley. That said, part of that is that Egypt is a fair sized country, I doubt it's the largest per-capita.

Anyhow, I do tend to think that rising food prices might tend to be a mixed curse as it were. Poor countries need a lot of food, but they're also often somewhat agrarian. If we can translate these food prices into agricultural jobs, than the prices should stabilize and more people would be employed. That said, I'm not sure how much under-utilized arable land there is in the world.