Russia wants to get Egypt hooked on its cheap grain – opinion

Recently, what is happening in and around Egypt has attracted attention, which is logical, since it is the world’s largest stable buyer of wheat and other grains. Moscow has been fighting for its market for a long time and is seeking to become a monopolist on it, displacing France, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria, said Serhiy Klimovsky, PhD in History, in his blog on the Obozrevatel website.

Egypt’s peculiarity is that wheat purchases are carried out centrally by the state, which effectively regulates prices for bread and flour. The stability and authority of the government directly depend on bread prices. If the Russian Federation becomes a monopoly supplier, the Egyptian government will be the same hostage of the Kremlin as the governments of Germany and other European countries were until 2022 due to their dependence on Gazprom. How Egypt will vote in the UN in this case on resolutions on the Russian-Ukrainian war is obvious. To this should be added the Russian Federation’s interest in selling weapons to Egypt, the desire to take away two French Mistral helicopter carriers that got there in 2016 because of the Russian-Ukrainian war, Egypt’s support for General Haftar’s government, the Egyptian-Sudanese dispute over the Nile water, and other lesser-known motives.

News from Egypt suggests that Moscow has already agreed with Egypt to supply wheat at a very low cost. On March 10, the Egyptian government announced its withdrawal from the UN’s International Grain Trade Convention (GTC) on June 30, which surprised everyone. Egypt’s participation in this convention allowed it to purchase wheat at reasonable prices. The withdrawal from the convention, which Egypt has been a member of since at least 1995, means only one thing: it has a very cheap and large supplier. It can only be the Russian Federation. In particular, this is indicated by the following report: in February, the Egyptian government signed an agreement to supply 240 thousand tons of wheat to Grainflower, a company registered in the UAE earlier this year. Grainflower’s website states that its warehouses with wheat are located in Azov and Rostov-on-Don, where it stores 200 thsd tonnes. “Grainflower is ready to deliver large quantities of wheat to any port in the world. The only thing missing is the announcement “We sell stolen Ukrainian grain”.

Tags: wheat, war, Russia, Egypt, grain