Warning From Cairo

CAIRO, Egypt - The current global energy-food crisis is, understandably, a pocketbook issue in America. But when you come to Egypt, you see how, in a society where so many more people live close to the edge, food and fuel prices could become enormously destabilizing. If these prices keep soaring, food and fuel could reshape politics around the developing world as much as nationalism or communism did in their days.

A few years ago, Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, belatedly but clearly embarked on an economic reform path that has produced 7 percent annual growth in the last three years - and now all that growth is being devoured by food and fuel price increases, like a plague of locusts eating through the Nile Delta.

Let's start the day here at Hussein el-Ashri's poultry shop - in the lower-middle-class district of Shubra - a shop that gives new meaning to the term "fresh chicken."

Customers arrive, select a live chicken out of a coop. It's slaughtered and de-feathered while you wait and handed to you in a bag with all the parts. Business had grown steadily over the years at Ashri's shop, as Egypt's lower-middle classes could afford more meat. But in the past six months, the price of chicken has doubled. Ashri explained: "Everything has gone up - electricity, the price of feed, gasoline, labor, the price of medicine for the chickens. Everything."

For Egypt's poor, who make up 40 percent of the population, food makes up 60 percent of their household budget. When wheat prices double, because more U.S. farmers plant corn for biofuels, it is devastating for Egyptians, who depend on imported American wheat for their pita bread. Bread riots are now a daily occurrence here. As for chicken, all Ashri knows is that "there are fewer customers and less traffic now." You need to give your kids meat, complains a lady in a veil, "but now you give them a little smaller piece."

What's happening is that the basic bargain between the Egyptian regime and its people - which said, "We will guarantee you cheap food, a job, education and health care, and you will stay out of politics" - is fraying. Even with the growth of the last three years, government subsidies and wages can't keep up with today's food and fuel price rises. The only part of the bargain that's left is: "and you will stay out of politics."