Egypt targets local wheat procurement of 5 million tons: Minister
The minister reassured that Egypt’s reserves of strategic commodities are “secure”, with current wheat reserves covering the country’s needs for approximately nine months, while sugar reserves are enough for one year and oil reserves for six months.
Farouk made the remarks on the sidelines of the FoodGuard Summit, held alongside the FI Africa 2026 and ProPak MENA 2026 exhibitions in Cairo. The summit aimed to discuss food security, food manufacturing, packaging technologies, and ways to reduce food loss and waste with global firms.
Egypt seeks to improve its supply chain efficiency, strengthen its food security and support its goal of building a high-productivity, export-oriented, and environmentally sustainable agricultural sector to become a regional hub for food industries, logistics, and distribution services.
The plan is driven by the ongoing regional tensions across the region, which have disrupted global supply chains and pushed up fuel prices, adding pressure to local markets in Egypt and raising concerns about further inflation affecting prices of some food commodities if tensions continue.
Egypt’s inflation rate accelerated by 1.2 percent month-on-month in April 2026, driven by increases in some food product costs.
The country has recently adopted a five-pillar strategy to improve food security, centred on increasing self-sufficiency. The plan includes expanding cultivated and reclaimed land, improving crop varieties, developing livestock production to narrow the animal-protein import gap and enhancing the competitiveness of agricultural exports.
Egypt is also aiming to reduce its wheat import bill by five percent in 2026 to 12.5 million tons, down from 13.2 million tons in 2025 and increase its wheat production to 10 million tons by the end of 2026, as well as expand rural development and agricultural areas by 600,000 fedans to 3.7 million fedans.
The government has plans to reclaim more than 3.5 million feddans in the New Delta, Toshka, and Sinai regions, in addition to the 10 million feddans already reclaimed.
The agricultural sector currently contributes about 15 percent of Egypt’s GDP and employs around a quarter of the workforce, while agricultural exports reached 9.5 million tons in 2025.