A three-month plan aiming at providing discounted food products started in Egypt on Monday. According to Minister of Supply and Internal Trade Khaled Hanafi, around one hundred different food commodities including poultry, meat and vegetables are now available in more than 4,000 state-owned consumer outlets throughout the country. Hanafi has held meetings with the owners of big supermarkets chains, food producers and wholesale traders who have agreed to provide the consumer outlets with commodities at discounted prices, according to Mahmoud Diab, the ministry's spokesman. “I hope the scheme will make government-owned consumer outlets as attractive to customers as they used to be in the 70s and 80s,” said Soheir Ali, a teacher and mother of two. “I remember when I was a child people used to stand in long queues in front of the cooperative outlets where products were sold at affordable prices.” The government decided recently to put the Holding Company for Food Industries under the umbrella of the Ministry of Supply rather than that of the Ministry of Investment in a move aimed at supervising the prices at the outlets. Hamdi Abdel-Azim, a professor of economics at the Al-Sadat Academy for Administrative Sciences, said that it was a good decision to transfer the affiliation of the cooperatives to the Ministry of Supply instead of Ministry of Investment. “Consumer outlets were looking for high profit margins when they were affiliated to the Ministry of Investment, but now they can be used to help achieve social justice by providing products at low prices for poorer people,” Abdel-Azim explained. He expected the move would help balance prices in the markets in general, as private traders could lower their prices to keep up with the competition from state-owned shops. At the end of the three-month period, the outlets will continue to sell food products to consumers at the 15 per cent discount they have been offering for the last 10 months. The ministry has also decided to develop the outlets to attract more consumers. Training courses will be organised for employees to improve displays and marketing capabilities. Abdel-Azim suggested offering employees a bonus as a percentage of monthly sales to encourage them to offer good services to consumers. “Training courses without additional financial incentives for employees will be useless,” he said. The upgrading plan also includes restructuring some of the outlets to make them specialise in selling vegetables and fruit. The transportation and storage of food products will also be improved in order to enhance freshness. According to Abdel-Azim, the number of state-owned retail outlets should be increased or reduced according to the living standards of various districts as the poorer districts rely more on them. The ministry is also to provide low-priced products through some 250,000 grocery shops in all the governorates that are responsible for distributing subsidised products. The plan will be carried out in cooperation with the owners of the large supermarkets who could display food products at 25 per cent less than market prices. The ministry is currently studying a number of proposals presented by supermarket chains to carry out improvements to groceries. The moves are part of a comprehensive plan to provide food products at reasonable prices. In order to finance the plan, Hanafi said that the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) had agreed to provide the foreign currency needed to buy basic food commodities such as wheat, one of the most important food staples.
