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South Africa won’t declare national disaster over drought

Reuters: South Africa will not declare a national disaster in response to its worst drought in a century as it hopes ample late rains will continue to improve the situation, deputy minister of agriculture Bheki Cele said on Sunday. "For some reason God has been kind and late rains did come, and we think the 6 million tonnes (of maize) we were looking to import - we have downgraded that to four," he told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of a conference in Dubai. The country's largest grain producer...

Egypt inches towards far-reaching food subsidy reform

Reuters: Egypt, once the breadbasket of the ancient Roman empire and now the world's biggest wheat importer, is paying a hefty price to keep its citizens fed with cheap loaves and other foodstuffs. The $5.5 billion which it spends each year on food subsidies, mostly on wheat, is a burden that it can ill afford as the economy falters and the budget deficit balloons after the uprising that ousted president Hosni Mubarak in February. But the financial pressure is not the only cost of the subsidy system;...