Priced out of protein

With every economic crisis and surge in inflation, Egyptian households reshape the quantities and varieties of food on their dining tables. The current economic crisis, however, has placed an even tighter strain on families striving to afford food, especially sources of animal protein.

"I used to buy three kilograms of chicken offal, boil it and make a potato casserole out of it. Previously, a kilogram cost LE10. Now, three kilograms cost LE150. So I had to stop," says Gamila*, a resident of Helwan and single-handedly supporting three children. Gamila works as a house cleaner during weekdays and spends her weekends preparing pastries and other baked goods for sale.

Chicken offal refers to the edible internal organs, legs, and wings left over after the prime cuts are taken out, such as breasts and thighs. Historically cheap, offal was typically consumed by the most financially strained families or purchased as food for pets like dogs and cats. The fact that Gamila and others can no longer afford offal signifies the severity of the crisis.

What options are left then for families trying to navigate rising food prices as they strive to stay within the average margins of protein consumption? Why has the crisis intensified? Was it unforeseen or a result of the nature of the existing food production structure?

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Comparing expenditure data on the food types consumed across various income brackets from 2015 to 2020 reveals two main patterns: in one, food has come to constitute a larger portion of the total household expenditure, while in the other, families have transitioned from nutritionally dense foods to cheaper, calorie-dense options of lower quality and nutritional value.

The crisis strikes harder for low-income families, who represent 90 percent of all households, because the food categories and protein sources they typically consume have seen price hikes higher than those consumed by higher-income households, according to a report by Fitch Ratings on the food and beverage market. This disparity is also evident in data on food inflation released by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS).

Suhaila*, a homemaker living in Fayoum, used to buy eight chickens every month for around LE400. She now makes do with just four chickens at the cost of LE900.

Not only has the quantity changed, but the way Suhaila prepares the chickens has "completely changed," she says. While she used to boil a whole chicken for a single meal in the past, she now finds that she can “derive more dishes from a single chicken.” The most prominent change in Suhaila’s practice is cutting the chicken into eight pieces instead of four, as she used to do.

After portioning the chicken, Suhaila takes the remaining parts, like the internal organs, necks, wings and legs, and boils them to make broth, which she stores to later use for cooking vegetables, without needing to have chicken on hand. She then uses the “leftover bits of chicken from the boiled parts to make dishes like shawarma or gollash.” Sometimes, she mixes the leftover bits with mashed potatoes for baking to save on oil, serving what is now known as "fake chicken pané."

Similarly, Maria*, a mother of two children and an infant, now minces chicken breast meat to stuff potatoes or to add to pasta in an attempt to cope with her reduced supply of chicken. She also collects liver and gizzards, chops and cooks them with onions and peppers, and serves it as a main dish with rice or bread, utilizing what was once just a side dish or a "snack."

Whereas a chicken used to be consumed in a single meal, it now covers multiple meals. All the women speaking to Mada Masr agree that chicken allows for flexibility to stretch food supplies and create a feast “out of nothing,” compared to red meat. Most of them had to forego buying fresh meat and turned to frozen minced meat in significantly smaller quantities.

Gamila also gave up buying meat a long time ago due to the high prices and now relies on her son, a butcher, to occasionally provide her with tongue and head meat, which she minces for optimal use.

Gamila used to raise poultry at home, feeding them leftovers from the houses where she works as a cleaner, along with subsidized bread and poultry feed. However, faced with the soaring prices of poultry feed, she had to ask herself, “Feed the chickens or my children? So I sold [the chickens]."

Amid the economic crisis, many Egyptians are struggling to afford eggs, milk and cheese. Speaking to Mada Masr, Abu al-Hamd Mehanni, a food science and nutrition professor at Sohag University’s Agriculture Faculty, categorizes eggs, milk and cheese as a primary source of protein. However, the consumption patterns of all the families speaking to Mada Masr show a significant shift toward rationing and cutting back on eggs and dairy food items.

Suhaila did not previously need to work, but she is now on the lookout for job opportunities. She used to guarantee that each of her daughters had a cup of milk and an egg before they went to school everyday. This required buying a liter of loose milk (four cups) every two days and purchasing a plate of 30 eggs that she would replenish as soon as it ran out. She used to buy four varieties of cheese every month to prepare sandwiches for her daughters’ school lunches, including feta, cheddar, baramily and rumi, at a cost that ranged from LE100 to LE150 per kilogram.

"I had to give all that up against my will, because I can't afford to buy milk every two days now that it's close to LE40, a plate of eggs costs LE160, and I don't even know how much cheese costs anymore," Suhaila says. Eggs and cheese used to be "continuously on display" in her fridge, but now, she says, "if I buy eggs, milk and cheese at today's prices, I won't be able to get the basics for lunch, so priorities have shifted."

Suhaila now limits her egg purchases to when they are necessary for dishes like a bechamel casserole or cake. Instead of buying a full plate of eggs, she opts for buying just a few eggs at a time, and the same goes for milk. As for cheese, she now purchases "Khushala," a cheaper salty variety, while visiting her parents in Minya.

Maria, on the other hand, found a way around the high cheese prices. "My children love spreadable cheese," she says. She buys Areesh cheese from a rural area as it is sold for LE50 per kg compared to LE85 in Cairo, where she lives. With the saved LE35, she buys loose milk and blends it with the Areesh cheese and “any of the flavor [concentrates] I get from the attar [spice shop].”

While Maria's husband maintains his job as a pharmaceutical company agent, earning a monthly salary of LE12,000, she eagerly awaits her infant to turn three months old so she can enroll her in a nursery and return to work at a pharmacy, which does not offer paid maternity leave.

Faced with their decreasing ability to guarantee protein, particularly affordable animal protein, these households are now forced to prioritize their children’s access to the food, especially when animal protein is part of the everyday meal. "My husband and I barely taste it. The children are always the priority," says Maria.

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A study published by the Egyptian Journal of Community Medicine revealed a sevenfold increase in the risk of stunting among children from families that consume one or fewer types of animal protein, compared to families that consume two or more types.

Families therefore prioritize providing their children with the best available food at the expense of the adults’ portions, according to a study conducted by CAPMAS on how families adapted during the COVID-19 crisis, which included sending children to eat at other families' homes.

Reducing consumption of poultry, eggs, dairy and meat was the predominant response to the crisis, a decision made by nearly 85 percent of Egyptian households, according to a survey conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute on 6,000 families. This aligns with the findings of another CAPMAS study on the impact of the Ukrainian crisis conducted with 17,000 families, which revealed that 90 to 95 percent of households reduced their consumption of animal protein.

It is worth noting that both studies relied on data collected in the latter half of 2022, before inflation escalated to historic levels in 2023.

Finding alternatives to animal protein is not an easy path. "A kilogram of black-eyed peas that no one likes costs LE120," says Maria, describing her reaction to learning the price of loose black-eyed peas from the attar, as she planned to prepare a meal free of animal protein. The prices of black-eyed peas increased by over 250 percent in two years.

Similarly, other protein-rich legumes saw their prices more than double, such as lentils, with prices rising by over 500 percent over the past two years, while fava beans more than doubled in price.

"Beans and lentils are highly strategic commodities for the general population," says Nader Nour Eddin, a professor at the Cairo University’s Agriculture Faculty and former advisor to the Supply Ministry. Eddin adds that lentils, a cheap staple, have even become a regular weekly meal for students in university housing and recruits. He considers the price hikes a “risk to the government's reputation among the general population.”

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Achieving self-sufficiency in beans and lentils requires the cultivation of 700,000 acres, he says. But according to Nour Eddin, government food policies are governed by a logic of "let me live today and kill me tomorrow." Instead of solving existing structural food production issues, the state’s increasing reliance on imports is evident in the variety of protein sources available and in the stages of their production.

Corn and soybeans are the main inputs necessary for poultry, cattle and fish feed production, while locally grown green fodder such as alfalfa only meets less than 20 percent of total demand due to its competition with wheat crops during planting seasons. This limits the potential for the fodder’s cultivation, according to Professor Sarhan Suleiman of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute.

Between 2017 and the first half of 2022, soybean and corn imports surged by 85 percent and 175 percent, respectively. But amid the worsening dollar crisis during the last fiscal year, soybean and corn imports declined by 12 percent and 32 percent, respectively, according to central bank data, which reflects a similar trend in meats, fava beans and wheat.

The state’s sudden withdrawal from adequately meeting local demand for animal feed, whether through restricting direct imports or customs clearance disruptions due to the dollar shortage, has impacted supply, leading to price hikes. The pound’s devaluation has also created a compounding effect, resulting in the current record inflation.

Sarhan believes that as long as the local currency continues to depreciate against the dollar, the state should prioritize locally producing animal feed. This entails supporting farmers through government-led coordinated efforts and market regulation to control the cultivated quantities of sweetcorn and sorghum, for example, and the implementation of a "contract farming" system to ensure farmers can sell their produce at global prices.

"Farmers do not farm out of patriotism and love for their country, but out of love for their home and children," Nour Eddin says. He adds that if the state gives farmers their due rights and provides them with benefits, grants and guidance to successfully grow strategic commodities (such as fodder crops) that can contribute to the production of meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy and cheese, as well as grow legumes such as lentils and beans, then they will shift away from onion and potato cultivation and focus on these more profitable crops. This scenario would then provide a food production structure  more resilient against price fluctuations, global disruptions and dollar crises, according to Nour Eddin.

Even the import process has been subject to practices that have exacerbated the crisis.

The owner of a poultry and egg brand, speaking to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity, says that as the state pulled back from supplying feed materials, imports became much less competitive, as one of the major importing companies in the poultry sector was allowed to gain exclusive access to dollars to import the primary link in the production chain — feed materials. This allowed them to dictate prices and influence the market, as they sold directly to traders and farmers.

Moreover, the government adopted a security approach to deal with producers, pressuring them to lower prices while ignoring rising production costs, according to a number of poultry and cattle breeders, and workers in the sector speaking to Mada Masr.

These measures included holding meetings with producers before Ramadan and issuing directives for them to lower selling prices, without considering production costs. Additionally, brokers were required to sign official reports, which Mada Masr obtained, commiting to not engage in bargaining or post prices on social media. Additionally, police forces set up checkpoints on roads and seized vehicles transporting poultry, according to a farm owner in Monufiya.

These factors combined pressured small-scale producers, leading to substantial losses and prompting many to exit the production chain, according to several farm owners. This has reduced poultry production by 30 to 40 percent, resulting in decreased supply. Consequently, the prices of solid white chicken increased fourfold and eggs tripled in price in just two years.

According to Nour Eddin, the reliance of 75 percent of the poultry sector on imports, from feed and vaccines to grandparent chicken and chicks, has left the sector highly vulnerable. Meanwhile, local production components are limited to farm labor and heating for the production stations necessary to maintain suitable temperatures for poultry during winter. This has made the sector prone to rapid collapse in the face of any dollar crisis. "Any claims of self-sufficiency in poultry production are mere lies," says Nour Eddin.

The same structural issues in poultry production are mirrored in cattle breeding for red meat, as well as dairy and cheese production. The cattle breeding sector has seen a sharp decline from 20 million to 6.5 million heads in the aftermath of the 2016 economic crisis, a drop of about 70 percent, according to Nour Eddin. The self-sufficiency rate in red meat deteriorated over a decade, from being 86 percent self-sufficient to a mere 40 percent, according to CAPMAS data.

Importing as a solution adopted by the state is more directly evident in red meat, according to Suleiman. Egypt imports red meat from Brazil, Chad and Sudan as live calves or frozen meat because the cost of meat production in these countries is lower than in Egypt. This is for two reasons: First, these countries produce feed locally, or their cattle feed on pastures; secondly, it is their intensive production, or large-scale production, that reduces costs per unit.

"The state says: 'Why bother producing something that is cheaper to import?’" says Suleiman. But, in the professor’s eyes, this reluctance from the state in its policies to enhance local production has contributed to further deterioration in the production structure at two levels. First, there has been a decline in investments in animal production and a shift toward imports, especially with the decline in consumer demand for meat due to price hikes, where the average consumption per individual in Egypt is not only lower than the global level but also falls below the African average. 

Secondly, small-scale breeders, who are farmers, contribute around 85 percent of local calves, according to Nour Eddin, who agrees with Suleiman in his assertion that a significant number of these farmers have withdrawn from the industry due to the financial burdens outweighing their capabilities. "The farmer is wise and knows how to calculate. They know how much they would have to pay and how much they would make per year if they invest in 100 heads [for example], and how much they would earn if they put the money in the bank," Suleiman says.

As a result, the price per kilogram of beef and buffalo meat on farms has tripled over three years from LE50 to around LE200, according to Mostafa Wahba, a member of the Butchers Division at the Cairo Chamber of Commerce, leading to final consumer prices reaching around LE400 currently.

*Pseudonyms