At the entrance to Manshiet Nasser, police at a blockade check every person coming in and out of the neighborhood. Along the narrow streets and alleys of the “garbage city” at the base of Moqattam, residents are huddled in groups, the fears of an uncertain future on every face. Others are hard at work, dwarfed by the piles of trash that they sift through by hand, separating empty bottles from crumpled cartons and leftover food scraps.

Home to at least 30,000 people, Manshiet Nasser’s community of zabaleen, or garbage collectors, is the largest of the nation’s so-called garbage cities. In a capital that produces some 25,000 tons of refuse each day, the zabaleen are grassroots recyclers who earn a living selling plastic, glass and cardboard to companies that will reprocess the material into new goods. The organic waste goes to feed the zabaleen’s other industry — pig farms that are the sole supplier of the nation’s market for pork products.

The future of that market, and of the zabaleen themselves, is uncertain. On April 29, amid growing international concern about Influenza A (H1N1), better known as swine flu, Minister of Health and Population Hatem El-Gabali announced a cull of the nation’s nearly 350,000 pigs. Local pig farmers and butchers were outraged at El-Gabali’s decision, calling it brutal and unfair, and insisting their animals were clean. At press time, swine flu has already been blamed for the deaths of at least 97 people around the world, with approximately 12,954 confirmed cases in 46 countries. The first cases were reported in Mexico at the end of April. As the virus spread, the World Health Organization (WHO) raised the pandemic flu alert to level five, one step below the highest level.

Egypt has not recorded any cases of swine flu, either in humans or in pigs. Soon after the first announcement, Ministry of Health and Population officials changed the rationale for their announcement: Now, they say, the cull is not a measure against swine flu but is intended more generally to improve public health.

“We know [] that we don’t have a real threat from the pigs now. The real threat is going to be spread from human to human [contact],” admits Ministry of Health and Population spokesman Dr. Abdel Rahman Shahin. He claims that the government was responding to a ministry committee’s recommendation from 2006, which urged relocating the farms due to concerns about the unhygienic conditions in which the pigs and their farmers live. The decision, he explains, was to get rid of the current population of pigs so that the industry can be rebuilt with new farms away from the human population and their homes.

Yet, whether the government will follow through with its promises of aid and compensation remains to be seen.

Ryan Luikens Officials spray disinfectant at the checkpoint for Moqattam’s ‘gar

This isn’t the first time the nation has dealt with a viral outbreak. The deadly H5N1 avian flu virus — which first appeared in Asia in 2003 — eventually found its way to Egypt in 2006, with the first reported bird infection in February of that year and its first human case just one month later. Despite the government closing all live poultry shops and culling the nation’s poultry, avian flu is now endemic to the country; to date, 27 people have died, mostly adults and older children exposed to infected birds in rooftop and backyard coops.

Taking a lesson from its experience with the avian flu, the government is attempting to be proactive and prevent the new flu’s spread before any human cases are detected here.

According to the Association for the Protection of the Environment (APE), there are six to eight garbage cities throughout the country; Cairo’s Manshiet Nasser is the largest of them. Pigs are raised in all the garbage cities, including Moqattam, Baragil near Imbaba, and Fifteenth of May City in Helwan. Shahin estimates that there are 350,000–500,000 pigs in the country; at press time, some 104,000 of them had been slaughtered.

“When the decision first came, the government said that they will just bury all the pigs, but when people got angry, they decided that they would slaughter pigs, so that the owners would still use the meat,” says Bekhit Rizk, who once had a pig farm and now works for APE.

Ryan Luikens The zabaleen say that for years the government have been ignoring their requests to move the pig farms away from their residences.

Health officials told pig farmers that they are responsible for bringing their pigs to Basateen, the large abattoir in Cairo, where they can either slaughter the pigs themselves or hire someone to do it for them, says Rizk. Additionally, the farmers say they requested LE 1,000 per pig in compensation, but they received only LE 50 for piglets, LE 250 for pregnant sows and LE 100 for males.

For most zabaleen, garbage collecting and pig farming are the only trades they know, and are their main sources of income. Killing the pigs will turn the farmers into beggars, angry Manshiet Nasser residents told Egypt Today, threatening to stop collecting garbage.

On April 29, panicked at the thought of losing their means of income, the community took action. When health and security officials entered Manshiet Nasser to inspect the pigs, outraged residents hurled stones at the ministry and police vehicles, resulting in the arrest of 16 people.

“The police and the government officials were cooperative,” says Father Sama’an Ibrahim, the pastor of St. Sama’an’s Church and Monastery and the godfather of Manshiet Nasser. “But the people were afraid of losing all they have; they are poor and have nothing but pigs and garbage.”

Because consuming pork is taboo in Islam, pig farming is an occupation carried out solely by Christians — evidenced by the crosses that adorn almost every home, coffee shop and work area in the neighborhood. The cull has raised tension between the Coptic minority and the Muslim majority.

“We feel we are discriminated against because all the people working in this industry, either [in] farming, garbage collecting or selling pork, are Copts,” says Rizk. “[The government has] wanted to get rid of the pigs in Egypt for a long time, and now it is their chance to do it, to end this business of pig farming here in Egypt. They cannot do this with our pigs and our resources.”

The families that occupy Manshiet Nasser moved there in the early 1970s when it was just a desert; they settled and have been the dominant community in the area ever since. Most of the people there live in crowded houses with their extended families. “I have 22 people living with me in the same house, and whenever we needed money, we would sell a pig and use the money for the time being,” says Ibrahim Israel Awad, a garbage collector and pig farmer. He says that the sale of a pig typically earned him approximately LE 6 per kilogram of its weight.

Awad explains that his entire family — regardless of age or gender — works in the garbage industry, separating the organic materials from the solid waste in the trash they collect.

“[We] work almost 20 out of 24 hours each day, and we get a [monthly combined] income of LE 1,000–1,500 out of both the garbage and pig businesses,” says Awad. The farmers’ income is divided almost evenly between garbage collecting and pig farming, including the sale of the pork products.

“We cannot live off garbage collecting only. The global financial crisis might not have affected many people in Egypt, but we [are feeling the] recession. We used to sell plastic products to foreign companies [] at a certain price, now we sell it for much cheaper,” says Shehata Atta Ateit Allah, one of the inhabitants of Manshiet Nasser.

Awad says that the zabaleen have always adapted to the government’s decisions. “When the government prohibited carts from Downtown, we thought together and bought a car to transport garbage,” he explains. “Now they should just give us some space to think of a solution.”

If local pig farming disappears, so will the market for pork products. According to Rizk, pig farmers in Manshiet Nasser do not sell directly to restaurants; instead they sell pork products to locals and middlemen who are responsible for delivering the meat to hotels and restaurants.

In the Om El-Nour butcher shop on a quiet Shubra street, Kameel El-Nadi opens an empty refrigerator. “The government told us to continue selling pork until we are done, and then end the business,” he says. El-Nadi is looking for a new job, as the owner of the shop has already lost LE 40,000. “We are closing down anyway. Do you think if we would sell meat or poultry [that] Muslims would buy it from someone who used to sell pork? We will just have very few clients and lose anyway.

“The media turned against us badly. I still could not understand why they are making a big fuss about it,” he continues. “Muslims do not want to deal with my neighbor who sells electronic appliances as his shop is right next to a man who deals with pigs, [and they are afraid] that he might infect them with swine flu.”

Johann Christ, better known as the “German butcher,” owns a catering company and factory that produces pork products such as ham and sausages. He deals with two pig farms, one in New Cairo’s Kattameya district and another in Fifteenth of May City; the pigs at these locations feed only on dry food made of vegetables and food scraps from hotels and restaurants. Christ says he does not know what to do with his business since health officials culled and poisoned the pigs in the Helwan farm where he buys the meat. Because there is a maximum limit on how many pigs can be slaughtered each day, poison was used to kill the rest.

“The point is, now that I have two or three months more of meat [that I can sell]. If people are not coming back, I will have to close. You think I’ve got millions of pounds? I have been in Egypt for 11 years. This is the second time [my business has failed]; I lost it six years ago [due to poor management] and now I will lose it again,” says Christ, adding that the government’s actions will not promote a better industry if no one can afford to participate.

He estimates the industry is likely forfeiting millions that have already been invested in farms and pig feed.

El-Nadi thinks the loss will be even greater. “We are just a small butcher shop here, [but] merchants will lose billions,” he claims. Whatever the number, it’s certain to be more significant than those outside the industry expect. Girgis Youssef Boulis, head of Ramsis Meats, told the Associated Press that pork accounts for 30 percent of the country’s total meat production.

“Already many workers are now unemployed. This is threatening our future and wellbeing,” says El-Nadi.

On May 13, Egypt’s well-known pork merchants, including Morcos Charcuteries, Ramsis Meats, Amoun and others, appealed to President Hosni Mubarak in a letter published in Al-Dostour newspaper, citing the imminent damage to their businesses and asking for his help.

“I’ve invested millions of pounds in equipment, including buildings, fridges, etc. Who will compensate me for these millions in investments?” asks Boulis.

Despite the fact that there have been no swine flu cases in Egypt, the general public is in a panic over the virus. On May 6, the popular TV talk show El-Beit Beitak aired a video of locals in the Abu Rawash district near Haram hurling stones at pigs and trying to run them over with their vehicles. Reportedly, the residents became alarmed after seeing some live and dead pigs on the road, believed to have fallen off trucks while being transported, and rumors quickly spread that the animals were infected with the virus.

Another video shot on May 15 by Maha El Bahnasawy, a reporter for independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, caused further outrage at the brutal methods being used to slaughter the pigs. The video, aired on the newspaper’s website, showed pigs being transported by trucks to the landfill in Abu Za’abal. The pigs are then beaten with iron bars and scooped up alive by bulldozers; the people responsible for slaughtering are seen pouring disinfectants on the pigs before burying them alive.

At least five petitions were posted under the animal welfare page on www.care2.com, a website that promotes environmentally-minded activism and healthy living, soliciting signatures from people to end the “senseless slaughter” of pigs in Egypt. Nearly 1,800 signatures appeared on one petition posted by the Society for the Protection of Animal Rights in Egypt (SPARE).

Health Ministry officials were not available to respond to the videos and conflict between the images and the government’s official statements that the pigs are being slaughtered for public consumption.

With the pigs destroyed, the zabaleen say that the garbage problem in Egypt is likely to increase dramatically. Isaac Mikhail, director of the Association of Garbage Collectors for Community Development (AGCCD), says that the community gathers and segregates 8,000 tons of garbage every day. Forty percent of this is solid waste, such as paper and plastic, while 60 percent is organic waste. The pigs eat about 30–40 percent of the organic garbage.

The problem, says Tarek Tawfik, chairman of Chamber of Food Industries, is that most of the pigs in Egypt are usually raised in areas equivalent to small garbage dumps, making the hygiene standards very low.

“There have been several [discussions] that this industry needs to be organized in a more hygienic way, by moving it outside the periphery of city and having [the pigs] raised under more hygienic standards in model farms as it’s done all over the world. The way they raise pigs over here is very primitive,” says Tawfik.

Yet, with the pigs’ garbage consumption rates in the thousands of tons, one can imagine that a considerable amount of trash would begin piling up without them.

Government officials claim that their goal is to improve, not eliminate pig farming. Minister of Agriculture and Land Reclamation Amin Abaza announced that model pig farms — meaning, farms that comply with international industry standards — will be established in Fifteenth of May City. The agriculture and health ministries, along with the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs, will cooperate on developing the farms, he says, with the government providing infrastructure, water and electricity for farmers. The new proposed location lies about 25 kilometers away from Manshiet Nasser, and farther for some of the other garbage cities.

“We met with the officials, and they said that they will only move farmers and merchants who have facilities such as cars, and can afford to go back and forth, “says AGCCD’s Mikhail. Yet still unclear is what will happen to those zabaleen who do not own cars and would have no form of transportation to take them from the new location to the city for garbage collection.

Despite government assurances that it wil support in the move, the zabaleen remain mistrustful. “We have been asking for it for years and now they are saying that they want to move us?” scoffs Awad. In Manshiet Nasser, Father Ibrahim says that they have been filing proposals and requests to relocate their farms and garbage business away from the houses and community for years.

“We filed Request no. 807 of 1999 to move to Kattameya when it was deserted. When we finally got an approval and actually moved 75 farms there, the government removed all the farms again [...], saying that the land was a natural reserve.”

Another request was filed in 2005 to move the businesses to Suez road, and a presidential decree (no. 338 of 2008) was issued last year to move the farms away from the population. According to Ibrahim, nothing has happened yet.

“People here work really hard, and instead of boosting and encouraging them to contribute more to the community, we just end their business?” he says.

But Awad says the community will not move without its.

“We will move if we have our pigs, but if they are just moving the garbage then they better leave us here.”

Influenza A (H1N1) is a genetic mixture of human, avian and swine flu viruses. While the disease is called ‘swine flu,’ until now there is no evidence that it infects pigs or originally came from pigs, but usually some of the infected cases had direct contact with pigs.

The H1N1 virus outbreak began in April 2009 in Mexico, spreading to at least 46 countries, infecting nearly 13,000 people across the world, and killing around 92 people within about a month’s time, with the highest cases and death toll in Mexico. The virus is transmitted from human-to-human, with symptoms including sudden fever, coughing, muscle ache, fatigue, diarrhea and vomiting; the overwhelming majority of reported cases are mild.

This is not the first time that this pandemic has appeared; there is evidence that a 1968 outbreak killed hundreds of people.

Up through the end of May, no swine flu cases have been confirmed in Egypt, and health officials are taking precautions to keep the disease from entering the country. People coming from countries with swine flu cases are to be checked at ports of entry, including at the border with Israel, which has reported at least one case of the virus. Anyone with suspicious symptoms is to be quarantined for at least 48 hours to make sure that the tests are negative.

“At the airport, we issue what we call a medical follow up card,” Shahin explains. “So whenever we have a group, they fill out their cards, and we follow up with them during their stay in Egypt.”

In order to eliminate the possibility of catching the virus, people are advised to:

Maintain a healthy diet, with plenty of fruits and vegetables.

Drink lots of water.

Exercise to keep your immune system functioning well.

Wash your hands frequently with soap and water.

If you feel you touched an infected surface, avoid touching your mouth or nose until you wash your hands.

Try praying in outdoor areas.

Avoid crowded places, like public transportation, where infections could be easily transmitted through breath.

If you feel you are suffering from a cold, try to stay at home.

Tamiflu or Relenza antiviral medicines could be used as a temporary protection against the current strain.  et

­Additional reporting by Jessica Gray