In Kafr el-Sheikh, rice farmers once looked forward to harvest time, but work has dried up in the large Nile Delta town since water shortages prompted heavy restrictions on production.
Under pressure from upstream countries to use its share of the river’s waters more sparingly, the Egyptian government has decided to severely restrict the farming of this water-intensive crop.
However, the move threatens the price and supply of a commodity that feeds many of the country’s burgeoning poor, as well as being a lucrative Egyptian export and a key employer in the agricultural sector.
PHOTO: AFP
“Right now we should be in the middle of our work season, which we wait for all year. Normally after the rice harvest we work day and night to meet demand,” said Mohammed, a local farmer.
“But since they banned us from growing rice in several regions to save water, we have no work,” Mohammed said.
“Many jobs depend on the production of rice — the farmers, the processing plants, the road transport, the exports ... It’s a very important industry for Kafr el-Sheikh and an essential source of income for its inhabitants,” said Ahmed Nasr, from the town’s chamber of commerce.
Rationalizing the use of its precious water supplies is a growing imperative for Cairo, with Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda demanding a more equitable share of the Nile waters on which Egypt so heavily depends.
Experts reckon that, mainly due to outdated water grids and flawed domestic water policies, one in four Egyptians is already without adequate access to drinking water.
Treaties signed more than 50 years ago entitled Egypt to 55.5 billion cubic meters each year, and another 18.5 billion cubic meters to Sudan, on the whole accounting for 87 percent of the river’s waters.
According to official data, about 20 percent of the Egyptian quota goes into rice production, which is now banned south of Cairo and restricted to certain regions of the delta, Egypt’s traditional bread basket.
However, climate change has already forced some farmers to abandon their land in the fertile delta, which provides around a third of the crops for Egypt’s growing population and which rising sea levels are threatening to turn into a salty wasteland.
The rice industry has already been hammered by the government’s restrictions. Egypt’s paddy fields have shrunk to just half the area they covered two years ago. Production, which stood at 3.8 million tonnes last year, of which 300,000 was for export, is expected to fall sharply.
Many farmers have since started growing substitute crops, but they are often taking a hit to their profits by doing so.
Rice prices have yet to spike in Egypt, but they threaten to do so just as the country faces heavy inflation on such other dietary staples as meat, tomatoes and certain vegetables.
Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer. Given the decision by Russia — the biggest producer — to ban exports earlier this year, Cairo is buying millions of tonnes of the cereal on the global market at great expense.
Meanwhile, to limit the impact on the domestic market of its restrictions on rice production, the government decided in June to ban exports until further notice.
“I am going to lose my hard-won markets. Instead of earning foreign currency, I’m going to have to spend it on imports. We’re going to find we have the same problem as with grain,” Nasr said.
Others criticize Egypt’s decision to focus its agricultural production on lucrative export crops, at the expense of basic food supplies for its 80 million people.
“Why reduce the area allocated to rice production when it is the staple diet of many Egyptians,” asked Habib Ayeb, at the American University in Cairo, pointing out that Egypt is a major exporter of another water-intensive crop — strawberries.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts