The House of Representatives’ plenary session is set to review on Monday a bill that would formalize an exceptional role for the Future of Egypt for Sustainable Development Authority, spanning food security, agriculture and land management, supply and development roles formerly handled by several ministries and state agencies.
The bill submitted by the government raced through the committee review stage in the House in just two days at the end of last week, to reach the plenary session just before Parliament breaks for summer recess.
The authority has become a familiar presence in the political scene in recent years. Beginning its life as part of a larger state-led desert “land reclamation” project in 2015, it has quickly expanded under the leadership of Egyptian Air Force pilot Colonel Bahaa al-Ghannam to take over and absorb key state functions, from national wheat imports to water resource management.
A joint committee spanning nearly every area of parliamentary policy reviewed the draft law last week, making a set of amendments to the text but rapidly passing over a final version to the plenary session for voting.
If approved, the bill would formalize legally the exceptional set of powers and responsibilities the authority has accumulated over the past decade.
Accumulating powers and responsibilities
The Future of Egypt for Sustainable Development Authority began its life as a desert land greening project, under the state’s broader 1.5 Million Feddan Project launched in 2015.
The New Egyptian Countryside Development Company that was running the program to convert desert into agricultural lands allocated 200,000 feddans in the Western Desert to the Egyptian Air Force in 2017, which in turn assigned the project to the directorship of Colonel Bahaa al-Ghannam.
Sources in the agricultural sector who spoke to Mada Masr previously said the project, which began producing strategic crops for the domestic market and higher-value crops for export within three years, was singled out for presidential attention.
By 2021, Ghannam was assigned additional lands totaling more than one million feddans in the New Delta Project.
And in 2022, a presidential decree transformed the entity from a project into an authority. Though this presidential decree is the foundation of the entity’s official existence, it was never published in the Official Gazette leaving its precise mandate and relationship with other state bodies ambiguous.
That mandate nevertheless continued to grow through a series of presidential decrees and directives, Cabinet land reallocations and administrative transfers assigning the authority new land, assets and functions.
The authority began to dabble in the supply of affordable strategic food products — formerly a Supply Ministry role — taking on a manufacturing role in partnership with the Supply Ministry for companies Qaha and Edfina, the former of which is a military company that began as a military rations supplier.
After that, it began to take on wheat. Where the General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC) used to be the world’s largest wheat importer, in late 2024, the Future of Egypt authority became Egypt’s sole authorized state importer of wheat and other strategic food products.
This gave it powers to bid on international tenders or to contract through direct awards, an import formula that has become increasingly important since global wheat supply was impacted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Officials speaking at the time presented the change as a way to shorten supply chains and reduce costs and delays.
The authority also began to handle domestic livestock and farming, with another set of presidential directives in 2025 transferring jurisdiction of Lake Manzala and related lands from the Lakes and Fish Resources Protection and Development Authority to the Future of Egypt for Sustainable Development Authority, following similar moves involving lakes Bardawil and Nasser.
It was also designated as the country’s sole rice exporter, seeking to enforce its monopoly earlier this year by instructing the customs authority not to issue export certificates without its approval, Mada Masr reported in May.
As well as granting it a role in the management of rice, a key food staple and a major export crop, the arrangement also placed it in control of the foreign currency generated by rice exports, stating that revenue should be redirected to strategic imports.
Livestock, dairy, poultry, storage and silo projects also ticked over in the background under the Future of Egypt’s management, as did a new and leading position in the Egyptian Mercantile Exchange.
The authority has more recently begun a bid to shape policy. Years of attempts to pass legislation allowing the import and trade of genetically modified crops have fallen through. But government and parliamentary sources told Mada Masr last month that a coalition, led by the Future of Egypt authority and comprising several multinational corporations, is working to legalize the production and commercial use of genetically modified seeds in Egypt in the coming months.
Future of Egypt takes center-stage
Earlier this year, the authority burst onto center stage in a highly publicized event.
The annual state festivities at the beginning of the wheat harvest season in May were given over to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s inauguration of the Future of Egypt-run New Delta agricultural development project — the agricultural, urban and industrial development of a vast 2.2 million-feddan area of desert land west of the delta costing as much as LE800 billion.
During the inauguration ceremony, the president waxed poetic about the project’s sheer scale, describing how it will be irrigated with agricultural drainage water collected from Nile Delta governorates, treated and then pumped through long transfer routes.
He pointed to the parallel development of 12,000 km of roads, extensive electricity networks and major pumping infrastructure to turn the desert plot into cultivable land.
Aside from his own praise, he also pushed officials to do the same, saying the project’s presentation to the public should underscore the expense and effort put into developing agricultural and logistics capacities that he said directly align with the state’s crop-planning.
“I will continue,” Sisi said during the launch ceremony, interrupting Irrigation Minister Hani Sewilam’s explanation before asking him to sit down.
Sisi stated that the water that will feed the New Delta Project is agricultural drainage water that was previously being “wasted” in the Mediterranean Sea. The president compared the current project to the modernization project of Mohamad Ali, noting that the latter dug waterways “from high to low,” while the new delta’s waterways were “constructed against the laws of nature. From low to high.”
He did not mention the diversion of around 10 million cubic meters of water daily westward from the delta — a strategy that an Agriculture Ministry source previously described as based on a “short-sighted” reliance on surplus Nile water resources in recent years.
Sisi stressed the need for a thorough explanation of the project. “We are not presenting the project in a way that does it justice.”
He turned to Ghannam, the executive director of Future of Egypt, saying , “You are undervaluing yourself and undervaluing the state’s efforts [with this presentation].”
Ghannam, meanwhile, took the opportunity to address the rising concerns about the authority’s expanding economic role, saying the Future of Egypt model aims to facilitate procedures for private sector and investment partners and “eliminate bureaucracy.”
Agricultural sources who spoke to Mada Masr in recent years have stressed how fast the Future of Egypt’s projects have moved and the broad cooperation the authority has enjoyed from other state bodies.
Formalizing an exceptional model
That speed has emerged from presidential backing, exceptional access to land and infrastructure as well as marked administrative laxity, with no published budgets or contracts through which to assess the public expense or return.
The bill, now being discussed by lawmakers in the House, would formalize much of that operating model.
It would transfer the authority’s oversight from the Defense Ministry to the president and establish it as a body of a “special and unique nature,” with separate legal personality and technical, financial and administrative independence.
Senator Helmy Gawish described the legislation as opening “a new phase in managing state assets and promoting investment” by giving the authority the legal and financial instruments to run major projects, establish investment zones and attract private capital.
The original government draft also proposed free investment zone incentives and the creation of a partnering sovereign wealth fund, Ahramat al-Nil, capable of receiving and investing state-owned assets and company shares, alongside a service fund able to receive grants and donations and finance social projects.
The bill would concentrate in the authority’s hands “the position of both regulator and operator, opening the door to institutional overlap that should have been governed by clearer rules of oversight and transparency,” the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights said in a statement on Monday morning, warning that the legislative move would grant unfettered and exceptional powers to the authority and recommending a set of further amendments.
The joint House committee narrowed on Thursday several of the government’s proposed exceptions before sending the bill to the House’s Monday plenary session
The amendments restored full oversight by the Central Auditing Organization, removed the authority’s blanket tax exemption and power to issue bonds, required parliamentary approval for creating sustainable development zones and stipulated that public assets within them may be managed but not sold.
The description Ghannam gave at the New Delta Project launch earlier this year, pitching the authority as an engine for development rather than an entity seeking to acquire or dominate other sectors, is echoed in the explanatory memorandum to the bill .
Despite the amendments tagged on by MPs as the draft law races through Parliament, its central premise remains intact — a bid to enshrine in law the authority’s exceptional license to maneuver and wield influence over matters that directly affect Egyptians’ food security as well as a vast array of public resources.
The post A law to formalize the ‘special nature’ of the Future of Egypt authority first appeared on Mada Masr .