Did you ever wander how it would
feel like to attend a lecture on Shakespeare given by an illiterate? A lecture
on the theory of Relativity given by a career floor sweeper? A lecture on brain
surgery given by a witch doctor? Well, my friend, if you wish to get a sense of
how you would feel to be in a situation such as those, all you have to do is
read the articles which are written about Egypt these days, and published in
the North American media.
One such article is titled: “Short
of Money , Egypt Egypt
for several years now, and he seems to have filed the current piece from the province of Qalyubeya
in Egypt .
Thus, you expect him to know better than what he is reporting.
Yes, he can be forgiven for
choosing to talk to the people in opposition and get their views more than the
people standing on the side of the government. And yes, it can be said that he
made the effort to represent both sides of the argument. But where he cannot be
forgiven is on the matter of verifiable facts that he so grotesquely mutilated.
He did so not because someone he interviewed said something false but because
he decided to echo the poison pills which are manufactured by the “Hate Egypt ”
propaganda machine that is based in the kingdom of ignorance known as the New
York/Tel Aviv axis of disinformation.
Look how he does that: “Energy subsidies
make up as much as 30 percent of Egypt 's government spending, said
Ragui Assaad,” which is correct and Kirkpatrick should have stopped here but he
did not. Instead, he added the following on his own: “The country imports much
of its fuel, and for the first time last year it was forced to import some of
the natural gas used to generate electricity – the reason for the recent
blackouts.” This is not only confusing but deliberately misleading.
The confusion stems from the fact
that the writer does not know that natural gas is classified as fuel. Thus, if
the country imported “some” of it last year, it means it would not be importing
“much” of its fuel. If the journalist had bothered to educate himself on this
subject, he would have known that on a yearly basis, Egypt uses the equivalent of one
and a half tons of coal per person. That would be roughly the equivalent of one
ton of crude oil or a little more than 7 barrels of it.
Some of that fuel comes in the
form of hydroelectric power, solar, wind and coal. The rest comes in the form
of petroleum products (about 30 million tons) and natural gas (about 35 million
tons.) Most of this energy is produced locally by companies that are purely
Egyptian or joint ventures with foreign partners. As it stands now, Egypt buys the
share of the foreign partners, and pays for it. This is why such transactions
are classified as imports.
Kirkpatrick could be forgiven for
not knowing this much. But where he cannot be forgiven – even called a
hopelessly ignorant jackass by choice – is when he writes something like this:
“Diesel fuel is the crux of the crisis, in part because Egypt has no
refineries and relies entirely on imports.” The fact is that Egypt has 9
refineries with a capacity of a little under a million barrels a day. The
country needs about 750,000 barrels of refined products a day which is supplied
more or less from the local production of crude.
The problem that Egypt has is
the same that every country which owns a refinery has. It is that crude oil
refines into myriad products, the quantities of which you can manipulate (by
cracking) but only to a certain extent. For example, a barrel of oil whose
weight may vary between 145 and 160 kilograms depending on the quality, would
refine by weight into 50 percent chemicals and 50 percent fuels ranging from
the high octane gasoline to fuel oil. Between these two come the diesel, the
jet fuel, the kerosene and the rest.
Depending on the kind of economy
that a country has, it could be using more gasoline than diesel while another
country could be using more diesel than gasoline. Because neither of them can
produce enough of what it wants even though they both have access to plenty of
crude, they swap gasoline for diesel. Egypt
does that in most part with Italy ,
and comes out with a surplus of about 4 billion dollars a year because it
exports more high octane gasoline than it imports diesel fuel.
Then there is the fact that the
problem of refining crude petroleum into the desired products intersects with
the problem of the choices that you make when using natural gas as fuel or
using it as ingredient to make chemical products such fertilizers, insecticides
and the like. Making chemicals is more lucrative but there is also the fact
that in Egypt ,
70 percent of the electric power on the national grid is produced by
co-generation stations that use diesel and/or natural gas. Thus, a shortage in
one can result in a shortage in the other, and the choices that you are
required to make each day are difficult ones.
The current difficulties in Egypt seem to
have been aggravated not because the supplies were diminished but because the
demand had increased. It so happened that after the Revolution of two years
ago, everybody got a raise in the order of 25 percent or better. They all rushed
to buy appliances – all of which use electricity. This increased the demand for
power to something like 10 percent a year when the previous averages were in
the order of 6 or 7 percent. And that required more natural gas and more diesel
fuel.
Then, there is another thing which
puts David Kirkpatrick firmly in the category of the hopelessly ignorant
jackass. It is this: “Egypt
also imports about 75 percent of its wheat, mixing the superior import wheat
with lower-quality domestic supplies to improve its subsidized bread.” The fact
is that with an arable patch of land that is in the order of one percent of
America's patch, Egypt feeds a population that is 25 percent that of America.
It manages to do this well because it has the highest yield of products per
acre. And a higher yield means a higher quality. Only a hopeless jackass can be
ignorant of this fact and of other associated facts.
One associated fact is that Egypt does not
import 75 percent of its wheat. It is expected to consume 14 million tons this
year, and the goal has been to produce 10.5 million tons which means produce 75
percent locally, not import that much. The production last year was 9.5 million
tons, and if the weather cooperates this year, the harvest may well get to 10.5
million tons. Otherwise, it may only be 9.75 million tons.
There is
so much more to say in this regard, and I am certain I'll be saying them in the
future because the jackasses abound out there, and they will provoke me enough
to say them.