CAIRO: Sky-rocketing food prices since the start of the year are being matched by a rumbling wave of popular discontent and unprecedented strikes and demonstrations.
Textile workers, teachers, doctors and accountants have all threatened strikes under the united banner of Stop the expensive life while doctors went ahead last week with a one-hour work stoppage for better pay and conditions
The average salary for a graduating doctor now is LE 220 ($40) per month, which doesn t buy very much, Hamdy El-Sayyed, head of the doctors syndicate, told AFP.
The syndicate is demanding a nearly six-fold increase in the average monthly wage to at least LE 1,200 ($219).
Last month around 10,000 workers at Egypt s biggest textile factory demonstrated against price rises, demanding matching wage increases.
The official annual inflation rate reached 12.5 percent in February, although the cost of foodstuffs including subsidized bread has risen by 26.5 percent over the past year, also according to official statistics.
The evolution of other staples is equally grim. Dairy products are up 20 percent, oil is up 40 percent. Local press publishes a list of rising costs, with some products up 122 percent since February 2007.
And you have to remember that inflation is much higher than the figures put forward by the government, Ahmed El-Naggar, economist at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, told AFP.
The UN s World Food Program said this month that average household expenditure in Egypt had risen by 50 percent since the start of the year.
Given that salaries haven t risen in proportion with food costs, it is becoming more and more difficult for people to survive, particularly those who do not receive subsidized goods, the UN agency said.
The government says that rising prices are attributable to the rising global cost of commodities such as flour, of which Egypt is one of the biggest importers.
The political opposition says that it is the liberalization of the economy under President Hosni Mubarak and Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif that has made the poor poorer and the rich richer.
Last September the World Bank issued a report on the satisfactory evolution of the Egyptian economy, with a growth rate of 7 percent, but pointed out that poverty had been on the rise since 2000.
Now, 20 percent of Egypt s population of 78 million lives under the poverty line of $2 a day, with another 20 percent hovering just above. Around four percent of Egyptians live in extreme poverty, the World Bank said.
The deepening crisis is accompanied by violence. Two people were killed this week when fighting erupted in a bread queue in the Cairo suburb of Helwan, a security source told AFP.
If the government doesn t realize the seriousness of the situation we will be heading for an explosion that will be bigger than that in 1977, said Mahmoud Al-Asqalani, spokesman for the recently-created Citizens Against Price Rises.
At least 70 people were killed when bread riots erupted in January 1977 after the government tried to reduce subsidies on the staple, of which Egyptians are the world s biggest consumers.
The officially sanctioned Egyptian Workers Union has said that it will try to get the minimum wage raised from LE 200 to LE 800 or around $150.
It seems that the Egyptian citizen no longer has any solutions, the opposition daily Nahdet Misr wrote in an editorial this week.
Every day he wakes to find a new price rise, so much that the increases are continuing as if in a nightmare.
