Is this a clean sheet for the Egyptian cotton industry or just more dirty laundry? Weeks after farmers claimed subsidy cuts would make their work untenable, Egypt’s agriculture ministry has announced emergency plans that have been presented as a revival of the country’s world-famous cotton business.
Agriculture minister Adel el-Beltagy promised this week to compensate a small group of farmers at above-market rates for their cotton crop, some of which ends up on the shelves of linen departments in British homeware shops. Beltagy also outlined a raft of decrees that will streamline the distribution of cotton seeds and regulate where cotton can be grown.
The farmers concerned will be paid around 25% more than the market price for their cotton, in what Egyptian broadsheet al-Masry al-Youm hailed as “an emergency roadmap to resuscitate cotton cultivation”.
The move follows Beltagy’s recent decision to end subsidies to cotton farmers, a cut that left the latter warning of the death of the industry. “Farmers are actually having problems even with the subsidy,” one farmer, Osama al-Khouli, told the Guardian at the time. “What will happen when they remove it?”
But this week’s decision has done little to placate the likes of Khouli. Farmers say the planned price hikes will only benefit the small group of cotton-growers contracted by the government to grow certified Egyptian cotton seeds. The rest of the industry, to whom those certified seeds are then distributed, will still sell their crops at the lower market rate.
“I don’t think it will revive the industry,” argues Gamal Siam, a cotton farmer and a professor of agricultural economics at Cairo University. “These prices are just for a very limited area, and they’re nothing new. This is what they’ve always done: contract farmers in certain areas to produce seed cotton.”
A spokesman for Egypt’s agriculture ministry did not return requests for comment.
Egypt’s farmers were all once required by law to grow at least some cotton. But the industry has been on the wane for 20 years: after the legal requirement was dropped, the world cotton price fell and growers turned to more profitable crops.
Experts say the drop will not affect Britain’s high-street linen departments. “Egyptian” cotton is legally grown in several other countries, thanks to Egypt’s failure to protect its copyright in the 1920s.
