3 ms·

But there were bad droughts that year that affected food prices world wide, and it wasn't just Egypt that was affected.

• vonmoltke 11y ago
  So, if the government is capable of developing contingency plans for handling droughts and doesn't, it's the drought's fault when shit hits the fan?
  • Houshalter 11y ago
    Do you not understand that events can have multiple causes? Rarely does disaster require just one single thing to go wrong. In any case, it wasn't just egypt that had uprest that year. Egypt wasn't even the first country to have problems.
• jessaustin 11y ago
  You're looking at the short term. Yes, grain prices would have been high that year anyway. But Egypt is not naturally dependent on imported grain; it took decades of mismanagement to make it so. If planting decisions had been made by independent farmers as they had been for millennia, Egypt would have retained the wheat-growing capacity that it had for millennia. In that situation, higher grain prices would actually have been good for Egypt. Instead, through Mubarak's twisted cronyist version of land reform, farmland was taken from real farmers and given to shadowy corporations who misused it in various frivolous schemes like growing flowers for Europe for a few years until it was unsuitable for further agricultural use.