It’s a dangerous situation many fear could lead to renewed political strife.

“People are scared of going hungry. They’ll give up anything but bread,” said 32-year-old Mohamed Maysara Hassan, an employee at one of the many bakeries that sell Egypt’s subsidized bread — a staple — in the heart of Cairo.

If the ailing government was forced to lift its hefty bread subsidy, which keeps one saucer-sized loaf at just $0.008, “There will be another revolution,” Hassan said.

Egypt, with its long history, is no stranger to food-based unrest.

As far back as the pharaohs, who presided over one of human civilization’s first recorded droughts, food shortages brought on by water scarcity led to a political breakdown, war and depopulation.

More recently, the “bread riots” of 1977 and 2008 — where rising prices or rumors of impending subsidy cuts led to deadly protests in the streets — exposed the dangers Egyptian leaders face when the country’s poor can’t afford food.

“Bread can be the fire-starter or the fire extinguisher of a revolution,” said Noor Ayman Nour, a prominent pro-democracy activist and son of Egyptian presidential candidate.

As much of 80 percent of Egypt’s 80 million people rely on subsidized bread.

“The regime [of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak] was very successful in keeping prices high enough so that people were on just the brink,” Nour said. “They were just insecure enough to remain subdued but not uncomfortable enough to revolt.”

But more than a year after Egypt’s revolution, food prices and the cost of basic commodities, like cooking gas, have hit some of their highest levels.

Egypt imports about 60 percent of its total food supply, because just 6 percent of the country is agricultural land — some of which is used to grow luxury cash crops for export. The rest is hyper-arid desert. The Nile is almost the only source of freshwater.

With rising inflation, a large and swelling population, and the threat of increased use of the Nile by upstream neighbors, Egypt’s capacity to feed itself is under threat. That makes Egypt’s vulnerability to global food shocks more acute than ever.

“After Jan. 25, [the current military rulers] have gone back to the Mubarak tactic of allowing prices to rise,” Nour said. “But blaming those who protest [against them].”

While bread is arguably the most crucial staple of the Egyptian diet, it remains somewhat shielded by the government’s $2.45 billion in annual bread subsidies.

But according to Magda Kandil, director of the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, other important parts of the Egyptian diet are also being threatened.

“[M]any of the food items in the consumption basket of Egyptians — fruit, vegetables — have gone up over the years,” she said. If the price of importing food continues to rise, “it would make the cost of living unbearable.”

Already the price of tomatoes — widely used in Egypt — has risen nearly 150 percent since Mubarak stepped down in February 2011, according to the government-run Central Agency for Mobilization and Statistics.

Food accounts for 44 percent of the Egyptian consumer price index, an economic indicator used to measure household expenditures on things like food, electricity and transportation — and as much as 40 percent of Egyptians live on less than $2 per day, according to the World Bank.

In contrast, food accounted for an average of 3.9 percent of the US urban consumer price index from February 2011 to February 2012, according to the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics.

Sayed Radwan goes to the subsidized bakery in his working class Cairo neighborhood every day to buy cheap bread for his family of four, spending just $1.15 to $1.30 per week. But that still gives him cause for concern.

When the prices of other food items or commodities go up, he said he has to buy less food.

“It is a constant worry,” he said. “We can barely sleep at night. We buy less fresh food. You can’t have a decent life.”

Egypt’s foreign currency reserves, which it uses to purchase imported wheat for its government-supported bakeries, fell to $15 billion in March 2012, down from $35 billion in the month before Mubarak resigned.

If Egypt’s post-uprising economy continues to falter, the issue of food security will be pushed to the forefront, analysts said.

“Food has proven a force for revolutionary change in the past,” wrote Christine Anderson, a former associate professor of international water law at the American University in Cairo, in her book, “Climate Change, Water Governance, Law and State Survival in the Arab World.”

And in Egypt, she wrote, “there are no remedies put in place to prevent a future food crisis.”

Heba Habib contributed reporting from Cairo, Egypt.

The nomination followed weeks of barbs over the extent of parliament’s power, between the party and Egypt’s ruling generals, known as the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF).

Leading members of the Freedom and Justice Party, or FJP, said last week they would press the military to be more transparent in its financial dealings. The extent of the military’s business interests is largely unknown.

But analysts say it ranges from tourist resorts to processed food to the manufacture of weapons and household appliances. They say the military makes a windfall on everything from bottled water and olive oil to computer chips and cotton underwear.

“The army must be made aware that there was a revolution, and that things have to and will change,” said Karim Radwan, a member of the FJP’s executive committee in Cairo. “The army must go back to its normal role as defender of the nation, and it should not have this kind of economic control. It should not be a state within a state.”

Crafted over the years to keep Egypt’s swollen ranks both buoyant and loyal, the army’s far-reaching economic empire accounts for between 5 and 40 percent of the country’s economy. It is kept largely secret and is closely guarded by the officers and generals who benefit from its profits.

In a rare admission to the existence of such holdings, SCAF’s chief financial officer, Maj. Gen. Mahmoud Nasr, recently told Egyptian news outlet Ahram Online that “the armed forces will fight to defend” their projects.

“We have been building them for 33 years,” he said. “And we won’t give them to anyone else to destroy.”

Ahmed Al Nahhas, a long-time Brotherhood activist and member of the FJP’s executive committee in Alexandria, said a parliamentary committee has already been formed to investigate and negotiate oversight of the army’s budget and earnings.

“SCAF does not want to be questioned. They are accustomed to the old way of doing things,” Al Nahhas told GlobalPost. “But there will be a new constitution and there must be greater transparency in the army’s dealings. If the Egyptian people accepted the situation before, they will tolerate it no longer. Everything should be made public.”

The army’s defenders say the military maintains small investments through the Ministry of Military Production, related mostly to the military’s need to provide food, equipment and entertainment for its rank-and-file. They say the businesses are largely in the interest of self-sufficiency.

“They have investments in clubs and hotels for army personnel, but nobody puts this money in their own pockets,” said retired Maj. Gen. Mohamed Kadry Said, now a military analyst at Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “The foreign media deals with this assumption that the army has some great, big secret piggy bank that is not subject to taxation or to questioning, which is just not true.”

But other analysts paint a decidedly different picture. They say a powerful military — with special privileges, state subsidies and tax exemptions — has morphed itself into a transnational conglomerate with stakes in industries worldwide, including US companies and with a near-monopoly on access to capital.

In December, the military loaned Egypt’s government $1 billion to boost its tumbling foreign currency reserves, offering a window into the size of its financial prowess.

“Egypt’s army is self-sufficient in the way that Chase Bank is self-sufficient, or Apple or Exxon-Mobil is self-sufficient,” said Joshua Stacher, professor of Egyptian politics at Ohio State University and author the report, “Egypt’s Generals and Transnational Capital,” published by the Middle East Research and Information Project earlier this year.

“The whole discourse that the army are purveyors of state capitalism, it’s not accurate,” Stacher said. “The military is incredibly neoliberal. But they control access to capital; they are the gatekeepers of capital. And this is what makes them extremely powerful.”

Gamal Mubarak, the son of ousted President Hosni Mubarak who sat at the center of the former regime’s economic liberalization project, privatized sectors that ran perilously close to the army’s own assets, creating tension between a government that was more tolerated by the army than supported by it.

In the end, the army sided with protesters during the uprising last year. Now Gamal and his capitalist cronies are almost all on trial for profiteering. As a result, the army has now eliminated most of its economic competitors, Stacher said.

With those tensions between Gamal and the army as a precedent, the FJP faces an uphill battle in bringing the army’s earnings under civilian control, particularly as political friction between the two intensifies.

“Change won’t come easily to Egypt. We have been ruled by the army since 1952,” FJP’s Radwan said. “But in order for us to become a real civil state, all things must change. The parliament insists the budget be made public.”

Stacher says the Brotherhood just isn’t strong enough to take on the military’s economic reach. It’s more likely, he said, that the army would placate the movement by bringing them into the fray.

“The military has such incredible access to potential patronage, it can co-opt the Brotherhood,” Stacher said. “If you want to be as realist as possible, they don’t have the money or the weaponry to compete. The Brotherhood can shut up and take the benefits.”

Heba Habib contributed reporting from Cairo.

The sheer number of demonstrators — as well as their insistence that celebrations of the so-called revolution be rejected — seemed to suggest Egypt’s young firebrand dissidents have a groundswell of support in their bid to fell the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), a coterie of unelected generals that seized power after Mubarak’s resignation.

But how well the revolutionaries can galvanize the thousands that turned out for the anniversary, which is a national public holiday and now wrought with symbolism, to help forge a sustained resistance to an increasingly repressive SCAF, is still unclear.

On Thursday morning, several thousand, some camped-out in tents, remained in Tahrir. A handful of leftist groups, including April 6, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition and the Kefaya (Enough) movement, declared an opened-ended Tahrir sit-in until the army cedes control.

The army-led democratic transition has so far been plagued by military trials of civilians, severe crackdowns on protesters and an uptick in sectarian violence — a more volatile version of Mubarak rule.

“The army repressed us and provoked us to demand our rights,” Joanna said.“We want a guarantee they will transfer power to civilians.”

The number of people, however, has dwindled to just a fraction of Wednesday’s demonstration, and traffic moved freely through the square.

Activists were calling for another mass demonstration after Friday prayers, a traditional day of protest that organizers hope will help maintain the anti-government momentum.

“I was never interested in politics. But when I saw the military attacking the woman in the blue bra, I realized we are living under tyranny,” said 25-year-old Amra Ahmed, an IT specialist marching from the impoverished Sayeda Zeinab neighborhood to Tahrir Square. “And this isn’t acceptable. This has to end.”

But support for prolonged protests has declined in many quarters as the Egyptian economy stagnates and the instability pushes millions even closer to the poverty line.

While the activists see their demonstrations as a noble effort to extract concessions from an oppressive regime, they also run the risk of alienating fellow Egyptians.

“The revolutionaries have not gotten beyond the stage of protests in the squares,” said Joshua Stacher, professor of Egyptian and Middle East politics at Ohio State University.

For many who want to see an end to SCAF rule but also to the unrest, the alternative lies with the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement’s Freedom and Justice Party, which now holds a majority in the newly-elected parliament, says civil legislation is the best way to usher the generals from power.

“I’m afraid for the country, it’s not going in the right direction,” said Hoda, an elderly woman also from Sayeda Zeinab. She did not want to give her last name.“I just want the parliament to do its job, and for a good president to take over and fix all of this.”

Despite the general harmony of Tahrir on Wednesday, the deep political divisions were not far from the surface.

As the sun set over the square, groups of young boys broke away from the crowds and began smashing rocks as they taunted police in riot gear defending the ministry of interior nearby.

There were no reports of violence between protesters and security forces overnight, but local shopkeepers were weary and unimpressed.

“These boys, they are the sons of dogs,” said one store owner.

About 7 million of Tunisia’s 10.4 million people are eligible to vote.

There was a festive atmosphere throughout the day in the capital, Tunis, where primary schools converted into polling stations received the streams of voters across the city and from all walks of life.

Young men waved Tunisia’s red and white flag from the windows of honking cars on the capital’s streets. Blue ink, administered at election booths to indicate a person had voted, stained the fingers of men and women, young and old alike.

“Whatever the result, I feel like I exist,” a smiling Hamid Lofti, 35, said outside a polling station after he voted in central Tunis.

Despite deep divisions among the various political parties over Tunisia’s future — the most contentious being the debate between secularists and Islamists — the election itself was a source of both national and regional pride for many Tunisians on Sunday.

This tiny North African nation was the first in the Arab world to topple its dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, through a popular revolt in January. Now, it is the first to hold successful democratic elections with zero violence and only minor voting violations, observers said.

“I feel so proud to be Tunisian,” said 22-year-old Qais Jelassi, who participated in the protests in Tunis that forced Ben Ali from power. “I never thought that this [free elections] would be the result of our demonstrations.”

Indeed, the process was smooth, transparent and organized, voters said. Nearly 50,000 elections workers, including 5,000 trained and accredited observers, were deployed to polling booths across the country.

Special stations were opened to accommodate citizens who had not yet registered to vote — but who could still register on the day of the election.

A text message service enabled voters to send their national identification numbers to a central hotline, which would reply with the name and address of their designated polling station.

“I thought I was registered in one place but they sent me to another voting station. It was frustrating,”said 42-year-old Olfa Bormeya, an unveiled, female lawyer in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Tunis.

Voters at at least four other polling stations in the city, however, voiced almost no other complaints.

Even in Tunis’s most impoverished and densely-populated neighborhood, Hay al-Tadamon, voters were cheerful and crowded the election halls well into the evening.

Polls were slated to close at 7 p.m., and at 6 p.m., as dark fell over the slum, local stations were still buzzing with activity.

“I voted for the first time, and no one told me who to vote for. It was of my own free will,”said 54-year-old Tounis Bouzazi, a veiled resident of Hay al-Tadamon.

She voted for Karama, an independent list of candidates, dismissing the popular Islamist party, Ennahda, as two-faced.

Ennahda, formed from a grassroots Islamic organization that was banned under Ben Ali, is the favorite to win Sunday’s polls.

Its experience and organization has won it followers across Tunisia, and particularly for its populist campaigns in the countryside.

Ennahda leaders insist they are not interested in turning Tunisia into a strict Islamic emirate, but secular Tunisians are worried the party will roll back the country’s progressive legislation regarding the rights of women and the liberal style of Islam that is practiced here.

Ennahda’s most likely contester for the most seats in the assembly, the secular Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), was polling at just 15 percent in the days before the election.

“If Ennahda wins, I would like to see sharia [Islamic] law,” said Tawfiq bin Mohammed bin Abdullah, a 62-year-old Ennahda supporter.”There are many women in Tunisia who do not know true Islam. Ennahda will not impose, but it will explain what it is in the Koran. And hopefully they will come to the true Islam.”

Others are drawn to Ennahda not only for its religious message, but for its longer history as a serious opposition group.

“Ennahda, they want to preserve our civil rights,”said 22-year-old Khalil Elalmi, a medical student who was arrested and beaten during the revolution.”They want to preserve our rights and take into consideration the law of Islam.”

“Their objective is to help people get a better life.”