The New Food Subsidies System and the Public-Private Nexus
Marie Vannetzel, CNRS Research Fellow
Webinar in English
21/10/2020 at 6 pm
Registration required here
Abstract :
In 2014, the Egyptian government launched a major reform of the Ration Card System (RCS), through which citizens access food
subsidies. Rather than being seen as a top-down social policy, the RCS should be seen as a complex set of social, economic, agricultural, industrial, trade and market policies, which are produced by a wide spectrum of stakeholders, pursuing different interests and aims, including public decision-makers and a whole range of intermediate actors forming the RCS supply chains.
The presentation will first show how these supply chains have been transformed into a hybrid form of private-public partnership. It will then focus on subsidized grocers to exemplify how the private-public nexus has reshaped the system and how this impacts the everyday practices of delivering subsidized food items to Egyptian citizens.
Marie Vannetzel is a CNRS Research fellow at the CEDEJ in Cairo, and currently a visiting teacher at the University of Cairo,
Faculty of Economics and Political Science (FESP). She received her PhD with distinction from Sciences Po Paris in 2012.
Through an interdisciplinary approach combining political science, sociology and anthropology, her research interest focuses on
the politics of social action and redistribution, and more specifically on the reform of food and energy subsidies in Egypt. She has
recently published “Visées allogènes et endogènes de la réforme des subventions en Egypte”, Egypte Monde Arabe, n°20, 2019.
