CAIRO -- The line started forming before dawn, as soon as the day's first call to prayer had faded from the trash-strewn streets of the Egyptian capital's Zelzal neighborhood. Men began pounding on the green metal shutters of the district's sole bakery.

"Aish! Aish!" -- Bread! Bread! -- the stubble-faced men yelled, shouting through the grillwork at bakers laboring over a dented, gas-fired oven. Cursing and pushing, the men thrust crumpled currency through the spaces in the grille.

"Have mercy! Have mercy on us!" a woman in a dusty black head scarf and abaya yelled.

Across Egypt this year, people have waited in line for hours at bakeries that sell government-subsidized bread, sign of a growing crisis over the primary foodstuff in the Arab world's most populous country. President Hosni Mubarak has ordered Egypt's army to bake bread for the public, following the deaths of at least six people since March 17 -- some succumbing to exhaustion during the long waits, others stabbed in vicious struggles for places in line.

Economists and analysts say the crisis exposes the government's inability to fulfill the decades-old pact between ruler and ruled here: As long as the country's authoritarian system has supplied cheap bread, its people have put up with the squelching of political rights and economic opportunity. For Egypt's more than 30 million poor, subsidized bread means survival.

In Zelzal, a grid of raw concrete tenements built by the government for people displaced by a 1992 earthquake, Hikmat Mustafa Ibrahim, a 62-year-old widow, emerged from the crush of men, women and children besieging the bakery. After a 3 1/2 -hour wait, Ibrahim had 30 round pockets of bread, about 25 cents' worth. It would form the bulk of the day's food for her family of six. Ibrahim sat down hard on a flat stone. "Finally!" she gasped.

"We will take to the streets in demonstrations. Or else we will steal," 30-year-old Hanan Sadek had said the day before as she stood in line outside the Zelzal bakery. Sadek's husband receives a $55 monthly salary, of which $45 goes to the rent. "If you have four children, really, you can't eat," Sadek said.

In 1977, a government move to lift the subsidies on bread sparked the only mass popular uprising in Egypt in the past half-century, including fiery street protests that left more than 70 people dead. Anwar Sadat, who was president at the time, quickly restored the subsidies.

Some Egyptian newspapers and ruling party politicians have urged Mubarak to respond to the bread crisis by replacing the current prime minister with a military official. "The mood of the people is angry," said Amr Elshobaki, an analyst at Cairo's Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "I think it's near collapse, the state."

One of the causes of the crisis is beyond the government's control. Wheat prices worldwide have more than doubled in the past year, spurred by increased demand, rising fuel costs and bad weather. Globally, food prices climbed by nearly one-fourth between 2006 and 2007, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Egypt is the world's second-largest importer of wheat.

As costs of cooking oil and all other non-subsidized food products rise, millions of Egyptians have come to depend even more on bread. But the rising prices have also made the black-market resale of subsidized bread and flour more lucrative, reducing the supply for the poor, said Ahmed El-Naggar, an economist at the Al-Ahram Center who has advised the government on the bread crisis.

The subsidized price of a 110-pound sack of flour has been less than $3 for years; the market price reached $45 early this year and has fallen to $36 since the government intervened.

Mubarak's instruction to the military to bake and distribute more bread is intended to bypass the corruption-ridden subsidized-bakery system. The government has also ordered the Investment and Interior ministries to increase production at bakeries they control, said Magdi Radi, spokesman for Egypt's cabinet.

Egypt's economy is expected to grow by 7 percent this fiscal year and is attracting billions of dollars in foreign investment. BMW, one of many luxury carmakers active in Egypt, reported a 20 percent annual growth in sales here last year.

But the percentage of Egyptians living below the poverty line -- meaning they make less than $2 a day -- rose from 16.7 percent in 2000 to 19.6 percent in 2005, according to the World Bank. In all, about 40 percent of Egypt's population lives in poverty, the World Bank said. Strikes by workers demanding higher wages have spiked since last summer.

The inequities between Egypt's poor and rich are stark. The average monthly salary of an Egyptian civil servant is less than $100 -- and most families in Zelzal scrape by on less than that.

A high rock wall borders the area, topped by a spiked iron fence. On the other side is Katamiya Heights, where whisking sprinklers water emerald lawns and putting greens. Cabinet ministers, the leader of a government-supported religious institution and other wealthy Egyptians live in villas that have risen in value by millions of dollars over the past decade.

Bodyguards with automatic weapons protect the government officials there, and guards with handguns patrol the neighborhood's many gates.

Hashem Samir, shoveling bread off a squealing conveyor belt in Zelzal's bakery, recalled entering Katamiya Heights once to work as a laborer. Sweltering before the oven, with flour clouding the air inside the brick bakery and hungry crowds pounding on the doors, Samir said he could not reconcile the two Egypts.

"How can you compare a villa that rents for 8,000 a month" -- about $1,500 -- "to people who buy their bread for five piastres," or less than a penny? Samir asked.

In the bakery line outside, a sharp-featured woman suddenly began weeping.

"Everything is bad in Egypt. We have no hope," the woman said. She rubbed her brimming eyes with tissue. It dissolved in the sweat and tears on her face. Other women in the line leaned forward, tenderly picking off the white flecks. She declined to give her name.

Ibrahim, the 62-year-old widow, had risen before 5 a.m. Kneeling in her dark home, she prayed, then collected the scrap of wood she kept to carry the day's bread for her family.

As dawn's orange light seeped through the gray haze cloaking Cairo, she stood well back in line behind women who had arrived one and two hours earlier.

Throughout the morning, men who had money to tip the bread workers pushed through the crowds. They swung wooden bread racks at each other, arguing over places in line and shouting curses. Women hissed the same, but they gave way when the old and infirm of Zelzal arrived to accept free bread from the bakers.

By 9 a.m., the sun had eaten away the last bit of shade under the bakery's tin eaves. Ibrahim emerged flushed and jubilant from the line 20 minutes later. On her tray were the 30 small, round loaves that were all the bakery allowed most customers to buy at once.

But Ibrahim needed 40 of the loaves, to round out the potatoes and broad beans that would feed her unemployed son, his wife, newly delivered of a second son, and their older boy. Sitting on the flat rock by the bakery, Ibrahim breathed heavily and steeled herself to enter the line again.

"Bless you, sweetheart! Bless you!" she cried when a neighbor girl handed her 10 loaves from her purchases. Ibrahim lifted the tray of brown bread onto her head to carry.

The next morning, her daughter-in-law would do it all again.

"The strong take," Ibrahim said, setting off for home. "And the weak wait."
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Special correspondent Nora Younis contributed to this report