World Grain - March 2016 - 35

FEATURE: A REGION THAT CRAVES WHEAT

now in places in Iran when the government restricts farmers
from planting. The big companies know what they want and
go after it. They don't need a trade delegation. The mediumsized companies are just afraid."
It all comes down to corporate will, said Ghane.
"Your biggest risk as a food industry is whether the Iranian
population will wake up tomorrow morning and eat breakfast,
lunch and dinner."
Added Jamshidi, "The U.S. government never said you are
not allowed to do business in Iran. They said that if you do
business there is a price to pay."
David Blumberg, CEO of Blumberg Grain, Middle East and
North Africa, considered the problem of food wasted around
the world which he put at a trillion dollars.
"It's certainly a lot of money - equivalent to about the GDP
of much of the Middle East and North Africa," he said. "If
you've got a trillion dollars, you'd be able to buy 63 million
Swiss army knives.
"Every year across the globe, we lose about a trillion dollars
in food waste. The bulk of that is lost before the food gets to
market. It's lost because of lack of infrastructure."
He gave an example of one particular year in which India
lost 30% of its crop post-harvest and the problem is not limited to India, with about 50% of the production harvested in
emerging markets never making it onto the market due to
challenges of logistics and infrastructure.
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best of the best in agricultural engineering," he said.
They would set out to develop technology targeted at
emerging economies. "We knew we had to educate the agricultural engineers and other experts in our team and acclimatize them," he said.
They developed a warehouse system with effective cold
storage. "One can store grain literally for decades at an end,"
he said.
Blumberg talked about a project in Egypt to develop the
largest grain storage facility in Middle East and North Africa
as part of that country's subsidized bread system and stressed
the political importance of bread supply.
"The day people took to the streets in Egypt coincided with
the day (former Egyptian president) Mubarak had to raise the
price of baladi bread," he aid.
The Shouna Development Project was put in place to help
safeguard a supply chain that was losing 50% of its crop.
"It was under the leadership of (current Egyptian) President
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"It's a project that does much more than revamp the Shouna
system. It enables the government to have modern storage and
processing for its grain."
The new system can segregate quality grains, for example durum, which the Egyptian storage system was not able to do before. It includes a command center which can track stock levels.
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Merzad Jamshidi, CEO and managing director of Iran's KFF Mills and chairman of the International Association of Operative Millers' Mideast and Africa District, was a featured speaker at the 2015 Global Grain Conference
in Geneva, Switzerland. Photo by Chris Lyddon.

ing of the wheat that it has," he said. "The company is able to
monitor the entire network - 294 sites spanning Upper Egypt
all along the Nile Delta up to Alexandria, 2.35 million tonnes
of static storage and 11 million tonnes of processing capacity
a year."
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kilograms of grain per Egyptian.
"The government will be able to identify any leakages that
occur in this system," he said. "Value addition will occur
throughout the system."
It would cut the amount of foreign currency that goes abroad,
Blumberg said.
Governments in the developing world are extremely aware
that with a lack of food security there's a susceptibility to its
citizens turning to extremism.
"President Sisi is aware of this and aware of the linkage
between food security and national security," he said.
The system could handle a move away from a state-controlled
system, he said. "Our program and our technology are easily
transferred into the private sector," he said. "Our systems are
designed to be developed incredibly rapidly. An 8,000-tonne
grain warehouse is able to go up in a matter of weeks.
"It's important that we safeguard product that is produced
and ameliorate the trillion dollars of food that is lost."
Chris Lyddon is World Grain's European correspondent. He may be
contacted at: chris.lyddon@ntlworld.com.
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World Grain - March 2016

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