Egypt’s count of rice straw fires is down 24.8% so far this season. Satellites picked up 486 burning points across Greater Cairo, the Delta, and Assiut between 1 September and 7 October, down from 647 in the same period in 2025, according to the Local Development and Environment Ministry’s 9 October statement. With the black cloud season underway, the question is what it would take to bring that count to zero.

Last season, straw collection expanded to seven Delta governorates — Qalyubia, Sharqia, Gharbia, Dakahlia, Kafr El Sheikh, Beheira, and Damietta — and collection sites rose to 655 in 2025 from 398 in 2024, while rice straw burning points dropped to about 1.1k from about 3.5k, an official at the Waste Management Regulatory Authority (WMRA) tells EnterpriseAM.

PM10 readings are down about a third since 2015. PM10 stands for airborne particulate matter 10 microns or less in diameter, small enough to be inhaled into the lungs. It’s measured in micrograms per cubic meter of air (µg/m³). Readings across Greater Cairo and the Delta fell to 102 µg/m³ in 2025 from 157 a decade earlier, according to a 2025 recap from the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA). The government aims to halve the 2015 level by 2030, bringing readings to about 79 µg/m³, the EEAA says — another 23 µg/m³ to cut in five years. We reported on the trend in November.

Behind the drop in burning incidents: The World Bank, which funds the government’s Greater Cairo air pollution project, credits the 2025 fall to faster detection and response. In its April 2026 blog post, “Towards Better Air Quality in Egypt,” World Bank Environment, Natural Resources, Climate, and Blue Economy Regional Manager Maria Sarraf and World Bank Egypt Country Director — now Group Corporate Finance Director — Stéphane Guimbert wrote that the EEAA fielded more teams for longer hours in peak months while a stronger satellite early-warning system flagged hotspots in real time. They also said wider straw reuse and more than 11k farmer outreach meetings helped. Burning had persisted for years because farmers “lacked affordable alternatives,” they added.

What the count misses

Some burning might fall outside the official seasonal count: “Stored straw can be burned later in winter without being counted in the official black cloud season statistics,” the WMRA official tells us. Each burning point is a satellite hotspot that inspectors either confirm on the ground or log as a violation, they say. Satellites watch the whole country, but intensive enforcement runs from September to the end of November and focuses on Greater Cairo and seven Delta governorates. The season’s figures usually close at the end of November or in December, so winter burnings go uncounted unless they’re logged as a general agricultural-waste fire, they add.

Winter burning of stored straw is “well-documented and moderately common,” environmental scientist Ghada Oraby tells EnterpriseAM. She researches policy to cut air pollution from agricultural waste burning. Stored straw tends to burn in smaller batches between December and February as farmers clear land for the next crop or stacks deteriorate, she says. Often, collection centers can’t sell or move bales before winter rains turn them moldy, she explains. Prices also collapse at peak supply, leaving holders to discard unsold bales.

What this season holds

The weather this autumn is set to trap more pollution than in 2025. The ministry’s early-warning system forecasts still air or light winds for about 37% of the season, up from 33% in 2025, Local Development and Environment Minister Manal Awad says. Those conditions concentrate pollutants and make them harder to disperse, she adds. Pollution from particles even finer than PM10 caused an estimated 12.6k premature deaths in Greater Cairo in 2017 and cost the equivalent of about 1.35% of GDP in FY 2016/17, according to a World Bank study, as we’ve previously flagged.

Awad launched this year’s campaign to address acute air pollution episodes on 4 September. Its plan adds more field teams and committees this season, Awad says. “There are 69 field teams and evening patrol committees on farmland to monitor and prevent the open burning of agricultural waste,” the WMRA official tells us. They work daily with agricultural directorates and governorates, they add. The campaign also covers factory smokestacks and vehicle exhaust, the 9 October statement shows.

In Dakahlia, burning points fell by about two-thirds in the first half of September. Satellites spotted 15 burning points in the governorate between 1 and 15 September, against 44 in the same two weeks in 2025, Awad says in her 21 September statement. By mid-September, the governorate’s 140 collection sites had gathered 60.9k tons of straw from some 330k feddans of rice, and farmers have rented about 37 tractors and balers.

Some 1.2 mn tons of rice straw have been collected so far this season, with the rice harvest just over half done, the 9 October statement shows. The 2025 season’s total topped 2.6 mn tons, according to an Agriculture Ministry statement on 24 November. That’s up from about 1.2 mn tons in 2024, before the expansion, according to the EEAA. The straw produced about 4.8k tons of organic fertilizer in 2025, the Agriculture Ministry adds. The Local Development and Environment Ministry also offered farmers 125 subsidized balers and tractors in 2025, up from 73 in 2024. Both ministries fund the system from their budgets, with support from the World Bank’s Greater Cairo project, the WMRA official tells us.

The WMRA issued 107 licenses to collect and transport agricultural waste in 2025. A single license can cover several collection sites, including those run by one contractor, the official says. Straw gathered at unlicensed sites gets seized, he adds, and inspectors confiscated 55 tons in one Dakahlia campaign. This season, Awad directs field teams to keep checking that collection sites hold a license, as Law 202/2020 (pdf) requires.

Why farmers still burn

Farmers who hand their straw to a licensed contractor usually pay nothing to bale it or haul it to a collection site. At most, the contractor takes a small service deduction, the official says. Farmers earn EGP 50-100 a ton, which they call “extra net income compared with burning it in the past.”

Revenue vs. cost: At EGP 50-100 a ton, and with each feddan producing 2-2.5 tons of straw, a farmer earns EGP 100-250 per feddan, Oraby says. The farmer still needs to clear the field at his own expense. The higher cost he bears comes from the delay in planting his next crop. She calls his gain “negligible.” On its own, she adds, the payment is “generally insufficient.”

What tips the decision: Machinery subsidies that cut the effort of clearing fields, and fines for open burning, do more than the payment, she says. Under Law 202/2020, those fines run EGP 50k-1 mn, up to a year in prison, or both. Guaranteed prices for straw used in bioenergy, plus pooled carbon credits for small farmers, could lift straw’s value to EGP 300-400 a ton, she adds.

Where the straw goes

The same law requires local authorities and agriculture directorates to provide land for turning agricultural waste into feed, compost, or fuel. Fertilizer is one outlet, and the government aims to lift output from straw to 10k tons, up from about 4.8k in 2025, the WMRA official says.

The industrial gap: “There is not nearly enough factory demand in Egypt to absorb all the collected rice straw,” Assem Mohamed, a professor of agricultural climate at the Agricultural Research Center’s Climate Change Information Center, tells EnterpriseAM, adding that combined industrial demand tops out at around 300k-350k tons a year. One industrial buyer is the Wood Technology Company (Wotech), whose plant in Edko, Beheira, turns about 245k tons of straw a year into medium-density fiberboard, according to the World Bank. The government says it opened the plant in 2024 with the Petroleum Ministry at a total investment of EUR 351 mn, according to an EEAA statement. The gap “is heavily cushioned by the livestock and agricultural sectors,” Mohamed says, with the rest of the straw going to cattle feed, bedding, compost, and energy production.

What zero would take

Getting to zero: “Enforcing the law alone is not enough,” the WMRA official tells EnterpriseAM. “If every ton has a buyer, whether a feed, wood, or paper factory, the motive to burn disappears automatically.” Oraby doesn’t expect burning to stop on its own. The remaining burning comes from plots under one feddan that balers can’t reach, the 48-72 hours farmers have to clear fields before sowing the next crop, and diesel costs that squeeze contractors, she says, so progress now hits “diminishing marginal returns.”

Time to zero: “Realistically, a complete zero-burning target requires three to five years of synchronized execution,” Oraby says. That means seeders that plant wheat straight into rice stubble and long-term supply contracts between farm cooperatives and industrial plants, she tells us. Mohamed also calls for “specialized, micro-scale baling and threshing tools” that can work small, fragmented plots, “so smallholder farmers have zero logistical excuses to resort to burning.” “Without structural interventions in micro-farm mechanization and logistics, reduction rates will naturally plateau,” Oraby says.

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