For nearly twelve years, a fava bean sandwich has been a fixture of Maha Abdel Salam's mornings. Maha, 34, works in quality control at a ready-made garment factory, commuting nearly an hour each way, six days a week, with Fridays off.
Beside the factory is a fava bean cart where workers gather every morning to grab breakfast before their shifts begin. Maha stops there every day, paying from the amount she has set aside for breakfast – a fixed daily food budget taken from her weekly wage, which she tries hard not to exceed.
Today, Maha pays 20 Egyptian pounds for two fava bean sandwiches, 10 pounds each. She remembers buying the same sandwich about 12 years ago for just one pound. Since then, its price has risen by 900%, making it ten times as expensive as it was then.
Over six working days, Maha spends 120 pounds a week on breakfast out of a total weekly wage of 1,200 pounds, about 10% of her income, before transport and other daily expenses.
Twelve years ago, when her weekly wage was 350 pounds, two fava bean sandwiches a day cost her just two pounds – 12 pounds a week, or about 3.4% of her income. Over the same period, her weekly wage rose by about 243%, from 350 to 1,200 pounds, while the price of a fava bean sandwich increased by 900%. Fava beans have remained, for Maha, one of the simplest breakfast choices most closely tied to a working day, but that simplicity now claims a bigger share of her weekly budget than it once did.
From one pound to ten times its price
There is nothing complicated about the sandwich Maha holds at the start of her workday: a loaf of bread, two spoonfuls of stewed fava beans, a drizzle of oil and tahini, and a pinch of cumin, all prepared on a stove fuelled by a large gas cylinder. For decades, that simplicity has made the fava bean sandwich a familiar part of the morning routine for Egyptian workers and employees. Yet its price has continued to rise steadily for more than a decade.
Maha recalls paying about one pound for the sandwich in 2014, with the price staying around the same level in 2015 before climbing, by her estimate, to about 1.5 pounds in 2016. From there, it continued to rise, reaching around 10 pounds by 2026.
Fava bean sandwich prices vary from one area to another, depending on the location of the cart or restaurant, the size of the sandwich, and any extras served with it. The prices tracked in this report are close to the lowest levels found in several working-class neighbourhoods, while prices are higher in other areas and shops. This means the 10 pounds Maha pays for a single sandwich is close to the minimum price for a fava bean meal around her workplace.
Despite the range of options laid out in front of her at the cart, Maha's order rarely changes. She seldom adds another sandwich, such as falafel or potatoes, because varying her breakfast has become more expensive than the amount she sets aside for her workday meal. For Maha, choosing between fava beans, falafel, or potatoes is no longer simply a matter of preference: it comes down to what her weekly wage can afford.
Simple ingredients, doubling costs
For Maha, choosing the fava bean sandwich because it is the cheapest option available is part of a much larger story that extends beyond the cart where she buys breakfast.
The sandwich's price isn't set only at the moment it's assembled. Its cost begins to take shape much earlier, in the fields, factories, and ports that supply its core ingredients.
Fava beans, long regarded by Egyptians as "the food of the poor," are no longer grown in Egypt in quantities sufficient to meet market demand; production and trade data point to a persistent reliance on imports to fill part of domestic demand. Nor does the story stop at fava beans: the oil added to the sandwich and the wheat used to make the bread each follow their own journey, one that runs from domestic farms through imports, global markets, and the exchange rate.
The sandwich that cost Maha one pound roughly twelve years ago now costs her ten pounds. To understand how its price reached that level, the first place to look is its main ingredient: fava beans, before turning to the other components that shape the cost of the meal she buys every morning. Data from Egypt's Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) suggests that the main issue has not been a continuous decline in domestic production, but rather that production has not kept pace with demand. In 2014, Egypt produced roughly 134,000 metric tons of dried fava beans. That figure fell to about 101,000 metric tons in 2019 before gradually recovering to around 175,000 metric tons by 2024. Imports remained high throughout the period, rising from 280,000 metric tons in 2014 to roughly 892,000 metric tons in 2019, before falling to around 664,000 metric tons in 2024.
Against this backdrop, the gap between domestic production and demand widened over several years, peaking at around 863,000 metric tons in 2019 before narrowing to roughly 607,000 metric tons in 2024.
At the same time, the self-sufficiency ratio for fava beans fell from 33.8% in 2014 to 10.5% in 2019, before recovering somewhat to 22.4% in 2024 – still far short of covering domestic demand.
Economic reform, empty pockets
As the gap between domestic production and demand widened, the cost of covering much of it through imports became increasingly sensitive to the exchange rate. At the end of 2015, the official exchange rate stood at around 7.83 Egyptian pounds to the U.S. dollar. By the end of December 2016, the year Egypt began implementing its economic reform programme, it had risen to roughly 19.3 pounds to the dollar. It continued climbing in the years that followed, reaching around 51 pounds by the end of August 2026.
For a commodity that relies heavily on imports, a weaker pound means that buying the same quantity of fava beans from abroad requires more Egyptian pounds, even before changes in global prices, shipping costs, and other trading expenses are taken into account. The effects of the production gap and currency depreciation have fed through the supply chain, eventually affecting prices at the fava bean cart.
Dr. Mahmoud Ibrahim Abdel Mohsen, professor emeritus at the Field Crops Research Institute of Egypt's Agricultural Research Center, says the area planted with fava beans in Egypt is not sufficient to meet domestic demand, making imports necessary to close the gap between production and consumption.
Speaking to Athar, Abdel Mohsen said fava beans remain a staple in the Egyptian diet, which is why limited domestic production leaves the market heavily reliant on imports to meet growing demand.
Economic researcher Elhamy El-Marghany offers an estimate of the acreage needed to reach full self-sufficiency, arguing that doing so would require expanding fava bean cultivation to around 500,000 feddans.
At the same time, El-Marghany tells Athar that economics is the primary reason farmers shy away from growing fava beans, explaining that in some seasons, sale prices fail to cover production costs or deliver a reasonable return for farmers, sometimes resulting in outright losses, making other crops a more viable, lower-risk choice.
Hussein Abu Sadam, head of Egypt's General Farmers' Syndicate, traces the decline in fava bean cultivation to factors that have built up over decades, among them a wave of crop diseases and pests in the 1990s that hurt yields and pushed a number of farmers away from the crop, eroding, over time, the accumulated know-how needed to manage the crop's problems in the field.
According to Abu Sadam, disease and pests remain among the biggest risks farmers face, alongside price volatility and weak returns in some seasons, factors that push some toward other crops, including vegetables, which offer a shorter production cycle and faster cash flow.
The problem extends to agricultural services in the field as well. Abu Sadam points to weaknesses in the agricultural extension system, noting that farmers, particularly those without prior experience growing fava beans, can struggle to identify a disease or pest and choose the right treatment, issues that call for sustained, hands-on agricultural guidance.
Compounding this is the rising cost of pesticides and other production inputs, along with what Abu Sadam describes as counterfeit pesticides circulating in the market, a problem that can drive up cultivation costs and increase the risk of loss when pest control fails to deliver.
From fava beans to bread: another import-dependent staple
Maha's sandwich story doesn't end with fava beans. The bread in the sandwich brings in another crop for which Egypt relies heavily on imports: wheat.
CAPMAS data shows that domestic wheat production has consistently fallen short of consumption needs over the past decade. In 2014, Egypt produced roughly 9.28 million metric tons of wheat and imported more than 8.1 million metric tons. Total consumption reached around 17.83 million metric tons, leaving a gap of about 8.55 million metric tons between production and consumption, with a self-sufficiency rate of 52.1%.
The gap widened in the years that followed, while the self-sufficiency rate fell to 34.5% in 2017. By 2024, domestic production had risen to around 9.44 million metric tons but remained well below consumption needs. Egypt imported roughly 11.85 million metric tons that year, while total consumption reached about 21.31 million metric tons. The resulting gap stood at around 11.87 million metric tons, with self-sufficiency at 44.3%. In 2025, domestic production stood at roughly 9 million metric tons, compared with imports of about 13 million metric tons, leaving Egypt reliant on imports for a substantial share of its wheat needs.
In other words, the rise in domestic production over the decade wasn't enough to change the underlying equation: in 2024, Egypt produced only slightly more wheat than it had in 2014, yet domestic output still covered less than half of available consumption, with the larger share of needs still coming from abroad.
The second core component of Maha's sandwich, the loaf made from wheat flour, is also affected by the cost of import dependence. Before the loaf reaches Maha's hands, the wheat behind it passes through a longer supply chain, beginning with domestic production that does not meet total demand and extending to imports paid for in foreign currency. This has become increasingly important over a decade in which the Egyptian pound has lost significant value against the dollar, the same period in which the price of the fava bean sandwich Maha buys has risen sharply.
Economic researcher Elhamy El-Marghany estimates Egypt's wheat-growing area at around 3.7 million feddans, producing close to 10.2 million metric tons a year, while domestic consumption exceeds 21 million metric tons. That leaves a gap of roughly half of total demand. Reaching self-sufficiency, he argues, would require expanding the area under wheat cultivation to close to 8 million feddans.
El-Marghany adds that import dependence also makes food costs sensitive to exchange-rate movements. He argues that successive waves of pound devaluation following the 2016 currency float raised the cost of imported goods and production inputs, with those increases feeding through, to varying degrees, into local food prices.
Hot chilli oil: a third ingredient held hostage by the currency
Maha likes her fava bean sandwich with hot chilli oil, a vegetable oil infused with spices for added flavour. For Maha, it ranks alongside the fava beans and bread as one of the sandwich's essential components.
Vegetable oil is produced from oil crops such as soybeans, sunflower seeds, and sesame, raw crops that yield much smaller quantities of oil after processing. Official data on these crops show a clear gap between domestic production and imports. In 2014, Egypt produced around 431,000 metric tons of oil crops, compared with imports of 413,000 metric tons. The gap widened sharply in the years that followed, with imports rising to more than 4.5 million metric tons in 2019, while domestic production reached only about 492,000 metric tons. By 2024, production had increased to 843,000 metric tons, but remained far below imports, which stood at around 3.5 million metric tons.
It is worth noting that these figures refer to the raw oil crops used to produce vegetable oil, not to the volume of edible oil itself.
Despite improved domestic production in recent years, reliance on imports has remained substantial, making the cost of oil sensitive to global market prices and the exchange rate, all the way down to the spoonful Maha adds to her fava bean sandwich each morning.
Ten times the price of the sandwich: what about the wage?
With a large share of the ingredients in Maha's morning sandwich either imported directly or made from inputs sensitive to the dollar exchange rate, the price of the sandwich has become increasingly sensitive to movements in the pound since the 2016 currency float. A weaker pound increases the local-currency cost of importing fava beans, wheat, oil crops, and other production inputs, with those higher costs feeding through the supply chain and, to varying degrees, into the price consumers pay at the cart.
At the same time, inflation has eroded the purchasing power of wages. Headline inflation stood at around 29.8% in June 2017, rose again to 35.7% in June 2023, then eased to 14.9% in June 2025 and 14.3% in June 2026. Rising prices have not been confined to food; transport, housing, clothing, and other essential expenses have also become more costly.
But Maha's wage hasn't kept pace with these increases. She earns around 1,200 pounds a week for more than eight hours of work a day, roughly 4,800 pounds a month, an amount below the current private-sector minimum wage of 7,000 pounds. Meanwhile, the fava bean sandwich she regularly buys has risen from around one pound in 2014 to 10 pounds in 2026.
In the end, the fava bean sandwich reflects part of the daily pressure Maha faces. Its price has climbed alongside the rising cost of its ingredients, the weakening pound, and broader price increases, while her wage hasn't risen at the same pace. Over time, a meal that was once among her cheapest options has come to claim a growing share of her income, widening the gap between what she earns and what she needs to cover her basic needs. For Maha, the question that follows her every day remains the same: what's left of her wage after the cost of getting through it.