CAIRO (Middle East Eye) – The International Monetary Fund (IMF) should ensure that any new loan program with Egypt expands social protection, strengthens judicial independence, and addresses corruption and the need for transparency, including for military-owned businesses, seven rights organizations have said.
Last month, Egypt’s government formally requested support from the IMF to help mitigate the economic fallout related to the conflict in Ukraine.
Egypt imports nearly 85 percent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, with at least 70 million Egyptians relying heavily on bread as a staple food.
“The war in Ukraine is having far-reaching effects on the national economy and nobody knows where things will stop,” Huda al-Malah, the head of local think tank International Center for Economic Studies, told MEE last week.
Egypt’s two cash transfer programs Takaful (“Solidarity”) and Karama (“Dignity”) cover only about 11 million people, leaving tens of millions living in or near poverty without support even as prices, particularly for food, have dramatically increased.
The groups, which include the Freedom Initiative, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, said that expanding the coverage and benefits of the programs was especially important as the government undertakes measures that they said particularly hurt low-income people.
In August, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi announced that the country’s decades-old bread subsidy program, which approximately 70 million Egyptians rely on, would be reduced
The government also last July reduced subsidies for sunflower and soybean oil by 20 percent, and unblended vegetable oil by 23.5 percent, because of the strain rising subsidies placed on the government’s budget.
Since 2016, the IMF has approved three loans to Egypt, worth a total of $20bn.
However, despite the loans, Sarah Saadoun, senior business and human rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, another of the signatories to the appeal to the IMF, said on Monday that “the IMF has not achieved the reforms needed to meaningfully address the military’s growing and unaccountable role in the economy or to expand the social safety net to adequately protect people’s economic rights.