Egypt buys 290,000 tonnes of American wheat: Minister

Egypt has signed contracts for 290,000 tonnes of American wheat, at an average price of $273.11 per tonne, to be delivered starting 15 April for a period of 10 days, supplies minister Khaled Hanafi announced on Friday.

The latest purchase will ensure that the country's needs are met until mid-May 2015, he said.

The government, which runs a bread subsidy programme for some 69 million Egyptians, is the world's number one importer of wheat.

Earlier this year, in order to reduce government spending on wheat, the Egyptian authorities launched a new smart-card scheme for subsidized bread.

The scheme seeks to improve on a former program in which the government provided bakers with subsidized flour to produce subsidized bread for consumers, but bakers instead often sold most of it off for profit to businesses, such as restaurants, leaving little flour for the subsidized bread for which it was intended.