THE Egyptians, a food-loving people, spend tens of millions of pounds a year on importing hot red pepper, popularly known as shatta, from India, China and Sudan, a recent governmental report has shown. The report, released by the General Customs Authority, says that Egypt spends $30 million per annum on importing 140,000 tonnes of hot red pepper alone and about another $40 million on spices. The Egyptian household is an orgy of consumption when it comes to cooking traditional dishes such as okra, koshari and mahshi (stuffed vegetables) that cannot be eaten without a few spices and a pinch of shatta. "There is a strong demand from consumers for the hottest pepper in the world, especially the type I import from India," Hajj Ragab el-Attar, the owner of a well-known spice shop in Cairo, told the Arabic-language weekly magazine Al-Mussawar. However, Mohamed el-Zarif Saada, another shop owner, disagrees, arguing that the hottest and the best shatta comes from Sudan. "Egyptian and Arab consumers ask for the hottest chilli, which is grown in Sudan," he said, adding that a kilo of dry Sudanese shatta sells for LE40. But the pepper industry was recently shaken up when Chinese chilli started to invade the local market, because of its low price, Saada explained, stressing that the Chinese shatta comes in the form of oil, not the dry seeds the Egyptians are used to. "But hotels and Asian food restaurants in Cairo buy it because tourists like it," he said, adding that he sells one kilo of Chinese chilli oil for LE500. Saada said that the three hottestknown peppers are the bhut jolokia, naga morich and Trinidad scorpion, which are heavily consumed by the Libyans, who make an extremely hot paste out of them called harissat shatta, which they add to their traditional dishes. Hajj Ragab regrets that local farmers grow so few pepper plants nowadays, which is why Egypt has started importing shatta from India, Sudan and now China. "Thirty years ago, Egypt was selfsufficient when it came to hot pepper. But now that the farmers are growing much less, Egypt has resorted to importing it," he explained. Dr Aida Mohamed of the Ministry of Agriculture said that the Egyptians like shatta because it not only adds a lot of flavour to their food, but it also has a wide range of health benefits. "Chillis produce capsaicin that can reduce cancer cells and, in some cases, even stop them growing completely. Several clinical studies show that natural capsaicin directly slows and reduces the growth of leukaemic cells," she stressed. In many countries, where people eat a lot of hot pepper, colon cancer rates and intestinal/stomach problems are much lower than in countries with a low consumption of chilli, according to Aida. "Medical experts agree that this low cancer rate may be tied to the large amounts of capsaicin in their diets. Most of the main dishes in their meals contain some form of capsaicin-based food, like jalapeno peppers and hot cayenne peppers," she said. "Eating chilli peppers has many benefits too," Aida commented, “because they help prevent and relieve arthritis, as they are a natural anti-inflammatory and help increase the circulation. "Eating hot chilli peppers helps maintain strong cell walls in the circulatory system and lower blood pressure naturally.”
