CAIRO, Egypt — It's unlikely that anyone has ever come to this city and commented on how clean the streets are.
But this litter-strewn metropolis is now wrestling with a garbage problem so severe that it has managed to incite its weary residents and command the attention of the president.
"The problem is clear in the streets," said Haitham Kamal, a spokesman for the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs. "There is a strict and intensive effort now from the state to address this issue."
But the crisis should not have come as a surprise.
When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt last spring — in what public health experts said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu — it was warned that the city would be overwhelmed with trash.
The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone, and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.
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What started out as an impulsive response to the swine flu threat has turned into a social, environmental and political problem for the Arab world's most populous state. It has exposed the failings of a government, where decisions are often carried out with little consideration for their consequences.
Speaking broadly, there are two systems for receiving services in Egypt: The government system and the do-it-yourself system. Instead of following the channels of bureaucracy, most people rely on an informal system of personal contacts and bribes to get a building permit, pass an inspection, get a driver's license — or make a living.
"The straight-and-narrow path is just too bureaucratic and burdensome for the rich person, and for the poor the formal system does not provide him with survival," said Laila Iskandar Kamel, chairwoman of a community development organization in Cairo.
Cairo's garbage collection belonged to the informal sector. The government hired multinational companies to collect the trash, and the companies placed bins around the city. But they failed to understand that people here do not take their garbage out. They are used to someone collecting it from the door.
Those collectors were the zabaleen, Egyptian Christians living on the eastern edge of the city. They collected trash and fed the organic waste to their pigs — which they then killed and ate.
Killing all the pigs, all at once, "was the stupidest thing they ever did," Kamel said.
When the swine flu fear first emerged, long before even one case was reported in Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak ordered that all the pigs be killed to prevent spread of the disease.
When health officials worldwide said the virus was not being passed by pigs, the Egyptian government said the cull was no longer about the flu, but about cleaning up the zabaleen's filthy neighborhood. That was in May.
Today the streets of the zabaleen community are as packed with stinking trash and as clouded with flies as ever before. But the zabaleen have done exactly what they said they would do — they stopped collecting most of the organic waste. Instead they dump it wherever they can or, at best, pile it beside trash bins scattered around the city by the international companies that have struggled in vain to keep up with the trash.
"They killed the pigs; let them clean the city," said Moussa Rateb, a former garbage collector and pig owner who lives in the community of the zabaleen. "Everything used to go to the pigs. Now there are no pigs, so it goes to the administration."
