On January 17, 2008 the New York Times published a piece by Michael Slackman under the title: "Egypt's Problem and Its Challenge: Bread Corrupts."
A little further down, we encounter this sentence: "Egypt is a state where corruption is widely viewed as systemic…" Way below that we are shown how systemic this is: "Over the course of an hour [a] 14-year-old…managed four trips to the counter…to ensure a steady stream of bread for a nearby food vendor, who then resold it in sandwiches...Down the road…a 12-year-old…was selling…the same kind of bread…for more than double the price [and] there were no lines."
But before we get to that last point in the article, we meet this cautionary note: It is hard to assess the actual level of corruption…In a…survey that ranked 180 countries by their inhabitants’ “perception of corruption,” Egypt fell…
Putting it all together we construct this narrative: The Egyptians perceive themselves as being systemically corrupt because some enterprising kids, rather than sell lemonade at the street corner or scalp tickets at a sports event, labor to beat the system where a limited amount of subsidized bread is allowed per customer. The kids achieve their goal by making several trips to the counter then resell the bread at double the price.
And of course, the troubling question that jumps to mind must therefore be this: Have you ever seen something as corrupt as this at a supermarket in America, Canada or anywhere else in the World? Of course not. Therefore, those Egyptians have got it exactly right to perceive themselves as being systemically corrupt. Right on, good people of Egypt, keep up that good criticism of the self! You may yet prove to liberal democrats of the neocon stripe, after all.
But is that all there is to the New York Times' piece? Not really because there is a bit more about why the publication believes Egypt has a challenging problem with bread corruption. It is not at all clear if the folks in charge of the Grey Lady know what they are talking about but hidden in their verbiage lies the true, albeit incomplete story of the situation in Egypt. Better still, the story is told with numbers.
Before telling the readers that Egypt's population is nearly 80 million, there is this assertion: "…about 45 percent of the population survives on just $2 a day." A quick calculation yields 36 million as the number of people who live at that level of poverty.
But further down the article there is a quote from a World Bank report saying this: "In sum, almost 14 million individuals could not obtain their basic food and non-food needs." Thus, out of the 36 million, there are 14 million who find themselves below the minimum standard which means that 22 million reach at least the minimum standard, and do so on $2 a day.
Let us pry a little more into the numbers. The article mentions an inspector who makes $42 a month which is equal to 230 Egyptian pounds. This puts the exchange rate at 5.5 pounds per dollar. But the man says he needs 1000 pounds a month to feed his children and send them to school. This comes to $180 a month or $6 a day. He spoke of his children in the plural, and when you include the wife, this puts the size of the family at a minimum of 4 persons. Now then, when you divide 6 by 4, you get $1.5 a day per person which is what the inspector says he needs to feed his family. This is substantially less than the $2 dollars mentioned earlier, but we keep going.
Given that the man is not making 1000 pounds a month but 230 pounds as the article says, this is less than a quarter of what he says he needs. In fact, a short calculation reveals that his salary provides him with only 35 cents a day per person which is a far cry from the $1.5 or $2 mentioned above. What is going on?
Given that we are not big on math in this culture, we do our brains a big favor by setting aside this thing about the exchange rate where the confusion begins. It also means that we must set aside the World Bank report. There used to be a method called the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) by which to factor in a constant for each economy and work out a useful table of comparisons. But the method was turned into a pile of rubbish under the regime of Paul Wolfowitz, and this leaves us with the analysis of the raw data only to put things in perspective.
Let us begin with a reality check. The inspector in the article never said he makes 230 pounds a month; the reporter assumed this. The fact is that when Egyptians quote a salary, they mean per pay period, and they get paid twice a month. In reality then, the man makes 460 pounds a month which was the minimum salary in Egypt before it was raised by 15% a few weeks ago.
The man is also a government employee which means this is a base salary on top of which he receives bonuses and other perks. In total he may not reach the 1000 pounds per month he wishes to have but he comes close. In any case, this is beside the point because what is in point is what follows.
Except for the unemployed, this man and his family would be one of the poorest in Egypt living on the minimum salary of one parent. But if you take his monthly base salary alone and multiply it by 12 you get the yearly sum of 5520 pounds. One of the perks he is entitled to is buy a new apartment at 40 000 pounds with a mortgage payable over a 40 year period at an interest rate of 7% guaranteed by the government as long as he owns the mortgage. Now ask yourself: How many people in the World can buy a home at a price that is 7 times the yearly minimum salary with those guarantees?
It is clear that the New York Times missed out on the real story to peddle this instead: "Much of what ails Egypt seems to converge in the story of subsidized bread. It speaks to a state that is…unable or unwilling, to conquer corruption…Over all, the government spends more on subsidies, including gasoline, than it spends on health and education."
Nowhere in the article is there an indication that the publication attempted to find out if the government intends to keep or phase out the subsidies and why so. If it had, the real story would have come out, and a more intelligent article would have resulted.
The fact is that the government feels the local manufacturing industries have now become robust enough to withstand the phasing out of the fuel subsidies and has begun to do so. As to the bread subsidies, the ongoing effort is two pronged. First, given that the world price for wheat is now rising, increasingly more acreage is devoted to growing wheat locally. And wheat is what is subsidized, not the bread.
Second, while the debate is still ongoing as to the best way to look after the needs of the poor, a system of welfare which subsidizes the person is slowly being phased in to replace the existing system of subsidizing the basic food staples such as wheat, cooking oil and sugar.
Does this mean the government made a mistake delaying until now the phasing in of the new welfare system? There are those who agree with this proposition and those who do not. In their defense, the latter point out a fact which came up in the New York Times' article: "How do you take a broken system that somehow helps feed 80 million people and fix it without causing social disorder?"
The conclusion to draw from this is that the old system is working because it has been feeding this many people while generating enough leftover to send to food deficient countries like Israel. As to the canard of saying that the system is broken but then admit it is "somehow" working is something that the venerable but "somehow" idiotic publication will have to explain.
What does not need explaining but needs a historical refresh is this quote: "His teeth are brown and misshapen from decay… [He] ekes out a living, with a cigarette hanging from his lips…" It is not the first time that a North American reporter took the trouble to describe the teeth of someone he met in Egypt. I encountered this sort of reporting immediately after the 1967 war, and then once or twice more after that. This mentality is in line with things like loading the intro to a television Public Affairs program with images from the Arab World that are not very flattering.
Perhaps what the Arab media should do to send a message to their counterparts across the pond that this sort of infantile behavior must come to an end is to splice together a few images of the homeless in America, especially those returning from the war with a stress syndrome of some kind and who display a weird if not a painfully comical sort of behavior in public places. Using a montage like this as an intro to every Public Affairs program in the Arab World should drive the point home to American journalists that they are not as pretty as they think they are.
As to the New York Times' story, if the reporter had done a better job at reporting, I might have believed his talent extends beyond journalism to dentistry. And I may have accepted the assertion that the teeth of the man in the story were misshapen from decay. But the reporter came up with a story which, in my books, should not have made it even in a supermarket tabloid. Consequently, I reject the insinuation that heavy smoking would brown the teeth and misshape them by decay. In any case, I stopped smoking 20 years ago and I don't care much about this issue anymore.
What we should all care about is that journalists in North America concern themselves less with someone's brown teeth and more with their own brand of yellow journalism.