Cabinet denies reducing bakeries’ quota of subsidized flour

CAIRO – 23 November 2017: The Cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC) has denied on Wednesday reports of a reduction in the bakeries’ quota of subsidized flour.

The IDSC said that although it denied such reports before, they resurfaced again in the current period, prompting the center to communicate with the Supply Ministry, which denied all these reports.

The ministry said that the bread subsidies system is working as usual, without any change in the quotas of subsidized wheat or flour to any party.

The Supply Ministry said that subsidized bread is a “red line”, with the price of a loaf of bread fixed at 5 piasters. It added that the wheat reserves are enough to produce bread until March 2018, saying that the General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC) is contracting to buy wheat through international bids to consistently enhance Egypt’s reserves.

In August, the Supply Ministry started a new system to subsidize bread that includes subsidies on the loaf of bread, instead of subsidizing the whole process from the flour mills, aiming to eliminate corruption in the subsidy process.