CAIRO - The nation will be suffering a serious shortage of foreign currency and continues to eat away at its monetary reserves. In three months' time, there might not be enough money left to purchase its basic food needs from abroad, so the country must not stop working and exporting its goods to the world. It seems a silly joke to see five hundreds lorries, some of them refrigerated, carrying crops and other foodstuffs, stranded at Port Safaga for five days, waiting for a ferry to transport them to Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states. This backlog of lorries carrying Egyptian products has been caused by the cut in the number of ferries working between Port Safaga and Saudi's Port Dabaa. There are now just two ferries operating on this route and they can't cope with all the lorries, most of whose cargo goes off if it's held up for long. Who decided to cut the number of ferries working between these two vital ports to just two, harming Egypt's exports at this critical time? The head of Safaga City, General Hassan Abbas, says that the third ferry that works this line is currently under maintenance. Is the huge queue of lorries really caused by a single ferry being out of service or has there been an unexpected rise in Egyptian exports to the Gulf, something Safaga cannot handle?! At a time when the country is desperate for foreign currency, the authorities, especially the new Prime Minister, should either borrow some more ferries from other Egyptian ports or rent some foreign ones, in order to cope with this apparent rise in Egyptian exports. In the meantime, an investigation should be launched to discover who is to blame for a problem that is seriously harming Egyptian producers and the entire national economy.
