The Reckoning

When we went on our 'trip of a lifetime' to Egypt in January 2009, we were chatting to the taxi driver who had taken us to Deir el-Medina and he was asking, "Where are all the tourists?". We thought that there were lots of tourists around, but he said no, that there were usually many more and that the Egyptians were earning much less as a result. We heard the same question from a tout later in the week. We explained that we had been 'credit crunched' and that people were afraid of losing their jobs and were saving their money.

This sparked a conversation about food prices, as wheat was beginning to rise in price and at home the 500g of pasta that had cost 33p the January before was now 75p, the 70p loaf was now £1.34 and cheese had risen by 20%. These price rises were something that most of us in Britain could shrug off, but in countries where such staples make up a fair proportion of the diet and where most ordinary people had 2 or 3 jobs to try to make ends meet; what would happen, we wondered, when these price rises hit whilst coupled with less income coming in?

Well, 2 years later, I think we just found out.