EU farm-product ban adds to Egypt's woes
Egypt’s economy, whose main exports have been battered by strikes and political uncertainty, took another blow this week after the European Union blamed a deadly outbreak of E. coli infections on Egyptian fenugreek seeds and imposed a temporary ban on some of the country’s farm exports.
However Egypt's ministry of agriculture has repeatedly denied that fenugreek seeds exported to Europe had caused the E. coli outbreak, AFP reported.
The EU ban blocks more than 10 percent of Egyptian agricultural exports, and the health concerns raised by the link to E. coli could have a wider impact. Moreover, it comes at a time when Egypt is struggling to earn the foreign currency it needs to pay for imports and provide jobs.
“If these were normal times, I wouldn’t have worried, but in the current situation this is serious,” Ahmed Ghoneim, a professor of economics at Cairo University, told The Media Line. “This definitely will have negative impact given the situation Egypt is experiencing where we’re losing a number of sources of foreign exchange earnings.”
Over the weekend a pipeline delivering Egyptian natural gas to Israel and Jordan was blown up for the third time this year, briefly cutting off deliveries. The government estimates that tourism to Egypt will fall more than 25 percent this year to a value of $10 billion as unrest deters visitors.
All this has spelled trouble for Egypt, as it tries to steady itself from the disruptions that led to president Hosni Mubarak’s ouster last February and put itself on the path to more democratic rule. With the economy contracting in first the six months of the year and foreign currency reserves falling, the transition is proving difficult. Now comes the blow to farming, which makes up 15 percent of Egypt’s gross domestic product and employs more than one third of the labor force.
The EU banned imports of all Egyptian seeds and beans for sprouting until October 31. In addition, all fenugreek seeds imported from one unnamed Egyptian exporter between 2009 and 2011 were ordered withdrawn from the market and are to be sampled and destroyed. The ban came hours after an official probe concluded that a shipment of fenugreek seeds used to grow sprouts imported from Egypt by a German company was the “most likely common link” to the outbreak of E. coli.
“The Commission will continue to monitor the situation very closely and will take additional measures if necessary,” EU Health and Consumer Commissioner John Dalli said in a statement.
The head of Egypt's Central Administration of Agricultural Quarantine, Ali Suleiman, said claims by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) that Egyptian fenugreek seeds exported in 2009 and 2010 may have been implicated in the outbreak were "completely untrue."
"The presence of this bacteria in Egypt has not been proven at all, and it has not been recorded," Suleiman told the official MENA news agency.
He said the Egyptian company that exported the seeds in 2009 has stressed in a letter that it had exported the fenugreek to Holland and not to Germany, Britain or France. The seeds were subjected to four different agricultural quarantines before reaching their final destination and no trace of the bacteria was found, said the Egyptian agriculture ministry.