CAIRO: Egypt has decided to cut domestic rice cultivation by one third, Mostafa El-Naggari, a representative of Egypt’s Agricultural Export Council, told Reuters.
The council cited water conservation as the motivating factor in reducing the land area planted with rice. The announcement comes on the heels of last week’s decision to extend Egypt’s ban on rice exports for another year.
First passed when food prices spiked in March 2008, the ban attempted to keep the domestic supply of rice inexpensive, despite the loss of potential profits for Egyptian farmers on the global rice market. Prior to the ban, Egypt exported significant amounts of rice for considerable profit.
While internal demand for rice in Egypt is about 3.4 million tons of white rice per year, government subsidies on rice as a staple food source keep rice farmers from earning at their former levels. Each feddan cultivated yields about 3.7 tons of paddy rice and land devoted to rice currently accounts for 1.6 million feddans; with government stocks of rice still full, the government is trying to force farmers to cut back on their former cash crop.
El-Naggari said the government will “limit the area planted with rice to 1.1 million feddans for the crop of 2010/2011. Although global rice prices remain high – and a recent shortage in Indian rice could drive them still higher – concerns over Egypt’s water supply conspire to force Egyptian farmers to sell their rice at lower domestic prices.
However, announcing a reduction in rice-producing land area may have little bearing on the amount of water consumed. Magdy Sobhy, economics analyst at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, expects the export ban will not outlive the 2010 election cycle. “Farmers know they must only wait until local politicians need to win votes, then they will lift the ban, Sobhy told Daily News Egypt in a telephone interview.
The ban does permit farmers to export the amount of rice that they sell to the government at subsidized prices; yet to make a profit, rice prices must remain at the peaks seen during last year’s food shortages. Exporting non-whole rice kernels is also permitted under the ban, as the Egyptian market will not buy partial kernels and some international food manufacturers will.
For the most part, farmers have to hope that global rice prices will remain high through the coming two years so they can cash in once the ban inevitably lifts.
The cyclical pattern of rice exportation, pegged to the Egyptian political calendar, means that water intensive crops like rice remain profitable for farmers and continue to drain water supplies. As a result, the efforts by governing bodies to reduce water consumption have remained largely ineffectual.
Sobhy points out that schemes to reduce agricultural water usage are 20 years old. Water shortages in the mid-1980s led to a slew of suggestions for cutting agricultural water use, yet today agriculture still requires 83.3 percent of Egypt’s water.
Millennia of seasonal Nile floods left Egyptian farmers reliant on irrigation methods that require similarly abundant water supplies. Some crops, rice in particular, do require such methods. However, choosing to grow crops that require less water, and implementing new irrigation methods could significantly reduce the amount of water that is, in essence, wasted.
Without a comprehensive plan to alter irrigation practices, Egypt’s future will see per capita water drop significantly. Egypt can currently provide about 860 cubic meters/person a year, putting the Egyptian population significantly below the water poverty line of 1,000 cubic meters/person a year.
In mid-July, MENA released data confirming that the needs of Egypt’s ballooning population will exceed available water supplies by 2017. The Nile river provides the majority of Egypt’s freshwater; in 2006, it accounted for 55.5 billion cubic meters or 86.7 percent of Egypt’s usable water.
According to the report, by 2017 the largest river in the world will only be able to supply 80 percent of the 86.2 billion cubic meters of water Egypt will need in eight years.
