Stephen Brown at Front Page Magazine writes about Egypt's already stagnating economy and the collapse of food resourcing that's likely to come in its wake, not to mention massive flights of refugees to Europe and even imminent terrorism that can threaten Israel:
Egypt is the biggest wheat importer in the world, but, frighteningly, may soon run out of funds to buy on international markets the necessary food to feed its impoverished masses. A story in the Financial Times last week states that the Central Bank of Egypt’s foreign currency reserves have dropped $10 billion, from $29.8 to $19.4, since last February.
“The current reserves are estimated to cover 4.8 months of imports, down from 6.9 in April, 2011,” the story goes on to say.
Which translates into only five months until catastrophe strikes. Egypt consumes 14 million tonnes of wheat annually, half of which it imports. The amount of wheat Egypt currently has in storage combined with planned purchases, primarily from Russia, is expected to last only until March.
While the recent massacre of Christians by the Egyptian army demonstrates that Egypt is disintegrating, the inability of the country’s rulers to feed their country’s millions of poor would lead to a collapse into chaos of monumental and cataclysmic proportions. The Asia Times columnist Spengler (a literary pseudonym), who has written about Egypt’s impending food crisis, believes it will not matter what form of government eventually takes charge in Egypt because the starvation issue will override all other concerns. As Spengler succinctly puts it: “Even Islamists have to eat.”
“It [Egypt] will look like the Latin America banana republics, but without the bananas,” Spengler states. “That is not meant in jest: few people actually starved to death in Latin inflations. Egypt, which imports half its wheat and a great deal of the rest of its food, will actually starve.”
But with the way they've been educated - or rather not - under Islamism, that's just why, depending on your POV, that's not good news. As mentioned above, there was the bloodbath conducted against the Christians last week, and as the article says, it'll likely get worse, with many Islamofascists taking out their anger about their self-inflicted damage on the Coptic Christians.
No solution is also to be found in Egypt’s backward agricultural and education sectors either. An Egyptian wheat field only produces about 18 bushels per acre, while a non-irrigated American field produces almost double. The Egyptian education system is also not one that produces innovative and creative people who could help solve the looming food crisis. One of the Egyptian presidential candidates, Mohamed Elbaradei, indicated as much when he said of the Arab world in general that it is “now a collection of failed states who add nothing to humanity and science,” as “people were taught not to think or act, and were consistently given an inferior education.” And the fact that 91 percent of Egyptian women undergo female genital mutilation, often at the hands of medical doctors, further indicates just how backwards Egyptian culture truly is.
It is thus highly doubtful that Egypt can reverse its appalling record of its treatment of Christians and women and reorient itself toward building the democratic institutions necessary for economic prosperity and cultural advancement that could feed a people. The corruption, the cultural backwardness, the anti-Christian hatred, unemployment, a stagnant economy, a dishonest, inefficient bureaucracy and Muslim religious fanaticism all point in the other direction. The Egyptian army’s killing of 25 Christians last Sunday, for example, cost Egypt substantial stock market losses besides the money from tourists who cancelled their vacations. Significantly, only Egypt’s finance minister resigned over the murderous incident.
Even if the Muslim Brotherhood doesn't rise to power (who knows if the election will take place; there are people in Egypt who're afraid of them), even the current rulership are not the kind of people I'd want to be around.
If a collapse does occur in Egypt, southern Europe can expect a massive flight of refugees to cross the Mediterranean in search of food and safety. Israel and the West must also be prepared in such a case to face in Egypt a failed state along the lines of Somalia and Pakistan, in which terrorists will be welcome. In such an anarchic situation, Egyptian Christians would be facing a Rwanda-style bloodbath, which the West should currently be preparing to prevent. In the end, disruption of the food supply will see Egypt plunge into a murderous chaos and become Africa’s latest, largest human tragedy.
If the west doesn't want tons of refugees who could end up biting the hand that feeds them turning up on their doorstep, nor a situation in which terrorists will operate and tons of innocent people murdered, that's why they're going to have to start preparing to face the coming crisis.
1 comment:
If the USA would stop using half of our corn crop for ethanol we could feed Egypt indefinitely - trade oil for corn. Of course, to do that, we need to "drill baby drill" so we have no need for ethanol which is a bloody inefficient fuel as it is, both from the production cost aspect and the energy content per gallon. Wake up people!
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