Thanks for this diary.  This wasn't intended to be a response to your diary, since I hadn't actually seen your diary when I wrote it (sorry!) but it did sort of work out that way.  I think the point is that Egypt's problem is not just food prices, it's that the entire system is broken and dysfunctional.  The subsidies have been a patch to avoid redressing the fundamental inequities in the Egyptian system, and suddenly the patch isn't holding anymore and the wound is gaping wide open.  And since this is a repressive police state in which the people have practically zero opportunity to hold the government accountable for its failures, this gaping wound has become dangerously infected.

As Amartya Sen wrote, "There is no such thing as an apolitical food problem."