CAIRO  - Egypt, a top wheat importer, bought 2.5 million metric tons of wheat from local farmers so far this season, the cabinet said in a statement on Thursday.

Procurement this season, which officially began in mid-April, has inched up compared to 2024.

According to official documents seen by Reuters, the government has so far bought 2.55 million tons, up from 2.53 million tons in the same period last year, signaling an improvement in the harvest that was underperforming in the first few weeks.

Despite a decrease in wheat-cultivated areas this season, the government expects to buy 4 million to 5 million tons of wheat from local farmers, having raised the procurement price by 10%, leaving it to import about 6 million tons to provide heavily subsidised bread for more than 69 million Egyptians.

The government typically purchases 3.5 million tons from local farmers.

Egypt's strategic reserve of the grain is estimated to last for 4-1/2 months, while vegetable oils were sufficient for 3.7 months as of May 7, the supply minister Sherif Farouk had said.

(Reporting by Momen Saeed Atallah and Mohamed Ezz; Writing by Tala Ramadan; Editing by Aidan Lewis and Louise Heavens)