Agriculture is an important sector for the Egyptian economy, accounting for 14% of GDP and one-fifth of employment. Several government strategies highlight agriculture’s central role in the structural reform agenda, including Egypt’s Vision 2030, the National Structural Reforms Programme, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation (MALR)’s 2030 Updated Sustainable Agriculture Development Strategy. In recent decades, government efforts to expand agriculture have focused on reclaiming marginal desert lands for production, resulting in a considerable increase in the total cultivated land area and rapid growth in exports of high-value horticultural crops.
While agricultural productivity and output are rising, they have not fully kept pace with demand from the population, which stood at 116.5 million in 2024 and is projected to grow to 160 million by 2050. As a result, Egypt continues to import key agricultural commodities and is currently among the world’s largest importers of wheat. Despite recent efforts to diversify its trade partners, the country remains reliant on imports from Russia and Ukraine, creating important vulnerabilities to trade disruptions, underscoring the importance of continuing to strengthen supply chain resilience and expand trade diversification.
A key challenge for Egypt is to tackle rising rates of undernourishment and food insecurity experienced by one-third of the population, while simultaneously addressing some of the highest rates of overweight and obesity worldwide. This “double burden of malnutrition” carries significant economic and social costs, including productivity losses, reduced educational attainment, and increased health care expenditure. This is partly due to the fact that healthy diets are unaffordable for the vast majority of Egypt’s population, while staple-based diets remain abundant and inexpensive. Opportunities exist to strengthen the country’s food system, enhance human capital, and promote long-term economic and social resilience.
The current policy approach maintains a heavy focus on food availability, by setting targets to increase self-sufficiency rates for strategic crops, along with minimum guaranteed prices and large-scale domestic procurement of staple crops by the General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC), a government agency under the Ministry of Supply and Internal Trade (MoSIT). In addition, the government imports significant quantities of strategic commodities via the military-owned Mostakbal Misr Agency for Sustainable Development, and maintains an extensive network of silos and grain storage infrastructure. Investments to upgrade the storage infrastructure have considerably improved Egypt’s storage efficiency. At the same time, the government facilitates access to staple foods at affordable prices for consumers through a bread subsidy and ration card programme. Collectively, these two food subsidy programmes benefited approximately two-thirds of the population, and cost the government an average of 1.4% of GDP per year over the decade from 2015/16 to 2024/25.
Over time, food subsidies have become a central part of Egypt’s social contract. While reforms are needed to improve targeting and reduce the fiscal burden of food subsidies, Egypt’s experience with the Takaful and Karama programmes indicates that cash transfers are more effective in targeting beneficiaries and reducing poverty. Furthermore, Egypt’s food subsidies encourage the overconsumption of energy-dense foods including bread, cooking oil, sugar and rice, and have had limited success in addressing the double burden of malnutrition. This suggests that a greater focus on nutrition-positive investments could be warranted, including scaling up school meal programmes and nutritional education.
Egypt faces considerable agri-environmental challenges, including declining per capita availability of water resources, and increasing pollution of soil and water. Current strategies developed by the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation (MWRI) aim to address water scarcity primarily through supply-side investments in irrigation infrastructure and modern irrigation technologies that have contributed to increasing water use efficiency. However, improving irrigation efficiency can alter water and cropping decisions in ways that aggravate water scarcity, if not backed up by robust water demand management systems. Furthermore, fertiliser subsidies where use is not controlled encourage the overapplication of fertiliser by farmers, resulting in nutrient surpluses. There are important gaps in the implementation of pesticide regulations.
Agricultural policies in Egypt are designed and implemented by a network of government ministries, agencies, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and military-owned enterprises (MOEs). This creates challenges for the co-ordination of policies affecting the agriculture and food sectors, highlighting the importance of continued efforts to align policies and strengthen institutional collaboration. The government intervenes across the entire value chain, through a broad range of support instruments including through price-lifting measures for staple crops, fertiliser subsidies, investments in R&D and irrigation infrastructure, and food subsidies for consumers. Some progress has been made, with support to Egyptian farmers falling from 21% of gross farm receipts in 2000‑02 to 10% in 2022‑24. Still, current agricultural support policies reduce market responsiveness and place a significant burden on Egypt’s economy, amounting to 2.8% of GDP in 2022‑24. This is higher than the levels observed across all 54 countries included in the OECD’s Producer Support Estimate (PSE) database. Reforms should continue to improve the efficiency of agriculture support measures in meeting policy objectives.
Gaps in the availability and quality of data, particularly relating to agricultural public expenditures, constrains the capacity to analyse Egypt’s agricultural policy environment. Further engagement with the OECD through its annual Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation exercise could help to improve transparency and support the design and implementation of policy reforms.