The final report on wheat supplies will address five main topics, said parliamentary sources from the House of Representative’s Wheat Supplies Fact-Finding Committee.
The first topic urges the Ministry of Agriculture to inventory agricultural holdings.
The current method of inventory is “so random that it is merely an appeasement measure”, a source told Daily News Egypt on condition of anonymity, saying it is one of the reasons behind the spread of corruption across different agricultural crops, including wheat.
The second topic covered is the inventory of beneficiaries supported by farmers’ subsidies, which range between EGP 800-1,000 per tonne of wheat.
The third addressed topic is the wheat supply process and the manipulation that takes place throughout so as to fake the supply quantities and benefit from the subsidies.
The fourth topic covered in the committee’s report involves the mills and silos that suffer from “flaws and corruption”.
The fifth topic addressed by the report is the function of bakery systems and smart cards, which were recently revealed to be corrupt as well, displaying a need for improvements and amendments.
Daily News Egypt revealed on Thursday that the US Bloomberg threatened the Egyptian government with withdrawing from the development of wheat shounas and silos. Bloomberg said that it is faced with many obstacles on the part of the Egyptian Holding Company for Silos and Storage, which has been ignoring the former’s request to connect electricity to the silos that have been developed.
Bloomberg announced it had completed the development of 93 out of 105 shounas that represent the project’s first phase, over 157 days in collaboration with the Egyptian Armed Forces.
Magdy Malak, chairperson of the parliament’s Fact-Finding Committee, said that the committee is considering all wheat-related problems, starting with seed planting up through the bakery systems to close the door on corruption.
He added that the whole wheat framework requires amendments, noting that there are 517 silos and shounas across Egypt and that different regulatory authorities are coordinating to conduct inspections.
