Modeling and Forecasting of Food Security for Wheat in Egypt Through Year 2025 by Using time Series ARIMA Models

Wheat is one of the major crops of the agriculture sector in Egypt and, most importantly, it represents roughly as half of the ingredients for Egyptians' daily food. The increasing demand of wheat comes as a result of the increasing number of populations. Thus, forecasting is the main tool for government in order to manage all processes of producing, consuming, and ultimately importing wheat efficiently and effectively. This study utilizes time series models to find out the best model to forecast the wheat demand and supply in Egypt. It develops time series models based on the data of production, consumption, and imports during the period of 2016-2025. We found that the best model is ARIMA (0, 0, 1), or simply (AR1). On the basis of this selected model, we found that wheat consumption was increased by 18.54 million tons, with a minimum of 9.48 million tons and a maximum of 27.64 million tons, while the production was still 9.6 million tons and the import was about 9,5 million tons. Our prediction of this model is that Egypt will continue depending on the imports in the upcoming years if the current policies remain unchanged. We provide some recommendations to help the government overcome this predicted problem based on our analysis. We do believe our result is of value for the Egyptian government in particular and any other country that might have the same circumstances as in Egypt.