Env. Ministry held 600 seminars to educate Egyptian farmers on manfacturing rice straw instead of burning it

CAIRO – 7 June 2022: Egyptian Minister of Environment Yasmine Fouad stated that the ministry has held 600 seminars to educate farmers on using excess rice straw in an environment-friendly way instead of burning it.

Egypt has suffered from air pollution for years, with its skies blanketed with thick black smog every fall due to the burning of agricultural leftovers, especially rice straw. This ugly phenomenon is known as “Black Clouds.”

"We gave farmers an alternative to burning straw and provided them with job opportunities, such as choppers and presses to produce the fodder that is sold, as this industry provides 5 governorates with one billion pounds within two and a half months, and thus farmers have stopped burning it," said Minister Yasmine Fouad in TV statements.

In a bid to preserve a healthy environment and combat climate change, the government has taken several steps, during the past years, towards eliminating the bad practice.

The government plans to reduce air pollution by 50 percent by the year 2030. This comes within the framework of applying long-term policies to control pollution in different sectors, including: waste, transport, industry and energy.

The plan to control air pollution depends on some pillars, including collecting and recycling rice straw in coordination with Ministry of Agriculture, where equipment for chopping, pressing as well as tractors were made available at subsidized prices to be used by farmers and youths.

Several controls were set for rice straw collection, in order to ensure no environmental problem occurs. For instance, the site should be close to a water surface, far from residential areas and electricity transmission plants, and a series of campaigns to raise farmers’ awareness about the importance of the process should be launched.

The ministry further continues to inspect industrial facilities polluting the environment in a bid to reduce the emissions.

Dr. Yasmine Fouad, Minister of Environment, said that the ministry worked to develop the environment system in all governorates of the republic, without increasing cleaning fees for citizens, during the past 8 years.

The Ministry of Environment succeeded in collecting and pressing 2 million tons of agricultural waste, at a rate of about 99 percent during the black cloud periods, and installed 256 developed models for the production of charcoal, and 116 stations in the national network to monitor the quality of ambient air.

The Ministry of Environment was also able to connect 88 industrial facilities to 438 monitoring points on the national network to monitor industrial emissions, and to examine the exhausts of 450,000 cars on the road.