Food

Food

We all know about poverty in the developing world. We cringe when we see pictures of starving kids; a lot of us cry.

What about Egypt? It's a poor country, typically settling somewhere in the bottom third of the various development indexes: what do it's poor people - it's common people or "baladi" people eat?

After all, as everyone knows, there's only a narrow strip of farm land along the Nile which is supposed feed a rapidly increasing population- one which has doubled since 1947 and continues to rise.

Are they starving?

Recently things have taken a turn for the worse. The Egyptian Ministry of Health and the United Nations Development programs (UNDP) reports that a third of Egyptian children are malnourished. Some say its because the Egyptian government decided to prevent the spread of Avian flu in 2007 by ordering that millions of the country's chickens done away with. Prices went up and poor people couldn't afford the protein.

This event was followed by an economic downturn, making the problem worse and driving the people to the streets.

The good news, generally speaking, is that "...the Near East and North Africa...[and other regions] have reduced hunger significantly since 1990; in Egypt, somewhere between a 25% and 50% reduction with those in the northern part of the country eating dramtically better than those in the south.

The other good news is that the Egyptian people have a 5000 year tradition of a well-balanced diet based on fish, grains, greens and legumes.

What the Egyptians do not know is that the traditional diet that they are abandoning is what the western world is now seeking to eat.

In spite of the narrow-strip-of-land/rapidly-increasing-population theory, the country fed itself handily until late in the 20th Century. In the late twentieth century, malnutrition "may have more than doubled."

What!!?

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), with a goal of increasing Egypt's wealth, imposed restructuring policies on Egypt which were intended to increase the country's wealth. Money did accumulate, at least among a group at the top, including foreigners and tourists. They wanted meat.

So Egypt began producing meat. This meant growing cereal for livestock - one kilogram of red meat requires ten kilograms of cereals - instead of for humans. The Egyptian elite ate better for certain; the poor replaced corn, barley and sorghum with imported and subsidized wheat flour, which is very slightly more nutritious than the other grains.

Still, the people ended up with less food for themselves.

With rapid urbanization -- meaning irregular eating schedules and the arrival of candy and soft drinks -- good nutrition took another hit.

All is not lost.

Egyptians today still rely on - and celebrate - many of those healthy and tasty traditional foods. We can hope that, in the long run, they will survive and conquer the incursions of the global market not to mention enter that special class of internationally known and loved foods like pizza and stir fry.