What does Egypt produce and export?

Almost all of Egypt is desert. The cultivated area is the Nile valley and delta, a small fraction of the national territory, and it has to support a population many times larger than the one it fed a century ago. Bread is the point of contact between that arithmetic and the state: a subsidized flat loaf has been sold at a fixed price since 1941, and most households are entitled to it. The wheat to make it cannot come from the valley alone. Egypt bought 9.0% of world wheat import value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), the largest share of any country, purchased in large tenders by a state buying agency and landed at Alexandria and Damietta. Feed for poultry and dairy adds 4.0% of world corn import value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), and the country also took 2.4% of world sugar import value and 2.7% of world palm oil import value in the same year (CEPII BACI).

The Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, changed the farming system as much as the diet did. It ended the annual flood, which had renewed the soil with silt each year, and replaced it with year-round irrigation and manufactured fertilizer. Egypt has the inputs for that: phosphate rock from deposits along the Red Sea coast and the Western Desert, and natural gas from the offshore Mediterranean fields to make ammonia. It produced 2.2% of the world's phosphate rock in 2025 (USGS) and held 7.6% of world phosphate-rock export value and 7.5% of world urea export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI).

The clearest reversal is cotton. Long-staple varieties developed in the delta from the 1820s under Muhammad Ali gave a fiber finer and stronger than any grown elsewhere, and Egyptian cotton became the standard against which quality was measured; the American Civil War, which cut off supply to European mills, made the country rich for a decade. Planted area has fallen steadily as farmers switched to food and horticulture and as mills worldwide moved to cheaper upland fiber. The spinning industry that remains now buys abroad, and Egypt took 1.8% of world cotton import value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). Citrus grown in reclaimed desert land near the delta has taken the place of cotton as the export crop, at 18% of world orange export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI).