Egypt is not plentiful in agriculture resources, whereby the total cultivated land is only 3.6 million ha, and total renewable freshwater is only 62 Billion Cubic Meter (BCM) for 93 million people. The water shortage in Egypt exceeds 30 BCM/year with Egypt’s water share per capita being 674 m/year. This severe shortage of water resources and arable lands in addition to growing population are one of the reasons why Egypt is one of the largest food importers in the world. Egypt is the biggest importer of wheat (12 million tons/year), and fourth importer of maize at 8.5 million tons/year and the seventh biggest importer of edible oils in the world, with a gap, reached 100% of lentil, 70% of broad bean, and 32% of sugar and 60% of red meat, butter, and milk powder. There are several impacts of food and water insecurity and socioeconomic impacts such as the soaring price of food, and small and tiny farm. More than 80% of land tenure and ownership is less than 0.8 ha in addition to very low share land per capita not exceeding 0.14 acres and continuous increase in poverty rate, which reached 27.8% at the end of the year 2016. To deal with this food insecurity, Egypt counts on major reclamation projects for an addition of more than 1 million acres as an extension to the present agricultural land located in North Sinai, at Toshka in the southwest valley and the Oweinat project in the far south of the western desert near the border with Libya. Agriculture related policies in Egypt should be reformed to plan and advance increased food production especially the essential crops such as wheat, maize, sugar, lentils and broad bean, oilseed, and meat and dairy products. Moreover, Egypt should make serious efforts to find new sources of water to combat water shortage, which may include untraditional sources such as desalination of seawater, treated sewage and treated industry water, and reclaimed agricultural drainage water, and also develop and renovate the whole agricultural system.

There is an urgent need to address the shortcomings of Egypt’s current social protection system as part of a new social contract between the state and its citizens. With Egypt in a state of economic instability and recent efforts to reform the social insurance system stalled, the aim of this article is to provide a review of social insurance (SI) and social assistance (SA) systems, particularly in terms of coverage of population and benefits adequacy. Our findings show that a large and increasing proportion of workers are without social security coverage. This is because of the expansion of informal employment reaching up to 75 per cent of private sector wage employment and around 85 per cent of non-wage employment. Such a shortfall of coverage is particularly pronounced among young workers aged 20-29, younger headed households and workers in rural areas. The economically vulnerable workers, who are the largest proportion of all workers and are in the lower wealth quintiles of population, are less likely to be enrolled in the social security system and will not receive any pension in their old-age. This SI coverage gap is combined with the failure of SA programmes to reach a large percentage of the poor. The SA benefits to poor also suffer from an adequacy problem where, in 2012, the average social assistance income represented around 6.6 per cent of the “very poor” and 4.4 per cent of the “poor” poverty line. While there have been some reform measures to increase pensions, the inflationary wave hitting the Egyptian economy would erode SA pensions and raise headcount poverty rate. These challenges have called into question the efficacy of the current social protection system and the state’s ability to provide for its citizens’ basic welfare. A comprehensive reform of the social protection system in support of the poor and vulnerable should remain at the top of Egypt’s policy agenda.

The current study presents a comparison for the electro-oxidation of formic acid (FA), glucose (GL), and methanol (ME) at nickel oxide nanoparticles (NiOx) modified electrodes. The modification with NiOx was pursed onto a bare glassy carbon (GC) and Pt-modified (Pt/GC) electrodes electrochemically, and the catalytic activity was measured in 0.3 M NaOH. Cyclic voltammetry (CV), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) are all used to provide a concrete characterization of the prepared electrodes. A catalytic enhancement of GL oxidation (GLO) and ME oxidation (MEO) was observed at the NiOx-modified GC (NiOx/GC) electrode, while the same electrode did not show any activity towards FA oxidation (FAO), revealing that FAO is substrate dependent. On the other hand, assembling NiOx onto the Pt/GC electrode assisted in improving the catalytic activity of all reactions (GLO, MEO, and FAO). The catalytic enhancement observed at the NiOx/Pt/GC electrode for GLO, MEO, and FAO was not only confined in the large increase of the oxidation current but also in a negative shift in the onset potential of the oxidation reaction. We believe NiOx could successfully play an essential role in this catalytic enhancement, presumably via participation in these reactions in a way facilitating the charge transfer or providing the oxygen atmosphere necessary for promoting an oxidative removal for unwanted poisoning species. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

The present study proposes a novel promising binary catalyst for formic acid electro-oxidation (FAO); the main anodic reaction in direct formic acid fuel cells (DFAFCs). The catalyst is basically composed of two metal oxides of nickel and cobalt nanostructures (i.e., NiOx and CoOx) assembled onto a platinum nanoparticles (PtNPs)°modified glassy carbon (Pt/GC) electrode. Actually, FAO proceeds at bare Pt surfaces in two parallel routes; one of them is desirable (called direct or hydrogenation) and occurred at a low potential domain (Idp). While, the other (undesirable) involves the dehydration of formic acid (FA) at low potential domain to produce a poisoning intermediate (CO), which next be oxidized (indirect, Iind p) at a higher potential domain after the platinum surface becomes hydroxylated. Unfortunately, the peak current ratio (Idp/Iind p) of the two oxidation routes, which monitors the degree of the catalytic enhancement and the poisoning level, stands for bare Pt surfaces at a low value (less than 0.2). Interestingly, this ratio increased significantly as a result of the further modification of the Pt/GC electrode with NiOx and a binary mixture of both I d This highlights the essential role of these in promoting the direct FAO, presumably via a mediation process that ultimately improved the oxidation kinetics or through a catalytic enhancement for the oxidation of the poisoning CO at the low potential domain of the direct FAO. The effect of the deposition order of NiOx and CoOx on the catalytic activity was addressed and fount influencing. The addition of CoOx to the catalyst was really important, particularly in improving the catalytic stability of the catalyst towards a long-term continuous electrolysis experiment, which actually imitates the real industrial applications. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

An Evolutionary Particle Swarm Optimization based on the Fractional Order Darwinian method for
optimizing a Fast Fuzzy C-Means algorithm is proposed. This chapter aims at enhancing the performance
of Fast Fuzzy C-Means, both in terms of the overall solution and speed. To that end, the concept
of fractional calculus is used to control the convergence rate of particles, wherein each one of them
represents a set of cluster centers. The proposed solution, denoted as FODPSO-FFCM, is applied on
liver CT images, and compared with Fast Fuzzy C-Means and PSOFFCM, using Jaccard Index and
Dice Coefficient. The computational efficiency is achieved by using the histogram of the image intensities
during the clustering process instead of the raw image data. The experimental results based on the
Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) technique and multiple pair-wise comparison show that the proposed
algorithm is fast, accurate, and less time consuming.