Imagine you have a country, a big one, yours to do with what you please. There’s just one catch. Nearly all the land is desert, which makes the remaining 5 percent the place where 70 million people not only have to live, but farm in order to eat. Around half the people live in towns, and half live in the country. The country half are largely farmers. They constitute 36 percent of the total work force. They work for almost nothing and supply your table with hand-grown foods. Plus, their labor enriches you – they contribute around a quarter of your GDP and exports. So how do you treat the farmers?
Common sense says you encourage them because working the land, as they have for generations, is a noble and profitable pursuit. You might even reward them for accomplishing so much with so little space, water and cash. But not if the country were Egypt. In that case, you would herd the farmers off the land and into jail, raze their villages and give them nothing. Meanwhile you would build on precious agricultural land for fast money.
Read the whole thing for statistics — one of the great thing about Maria’s writing about Egypt is that it’s always shock-full of fascinating stats, as her book Cairo, City of Sand was — and the worrying conclusion: Egypt needs urgent, comprehensive land reform (beyond the limited, and at times disastrous, reform undertaken by Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak) not only to improve the conditions of fellahin but to literally prevent the country from running out of land. I’m always astounded that Egyptian newspaper columnists, who often speak about the need to achieve autarky in food supply (dream on!), urge the government to make farmers grow more wheat but never mention that there is less and less arable land available to grow anything at all. The disconnect between the urban intelligentsia and rural folks could not be wider. The column has a great line on this: “Only abiding shame in their rural past can account for successive administrations’ criminal neglect of Egypt’s countryside.”
Excellent post of extreme importance.
My father still laments the land-grab that Nasser did back in the day. Just the like the article said, “Like many reasonable ideas that threaten the elite, it was doomed.”…
I guess you can sweep Land Reform along with every other “reform” Muburak has promised under the rug…Egypt needs a new president, bad, now.
Timothy Mitchell wrote an articel some time ago (i think an updated version is in his book Rule of Experts) about USAID-egyptian farming policies. he focused on the issue of wheat and argued that it isn’t (or wasn’t, at least) a question of more or less arable land (relative to population growth) as much as it is one of what’s being grown. too much land is used to grow feed for livestock to supply the ever-growing meat market (grows with growing wealthy class, naturally), thus reducing land for growing other stuff. i haven’t read Maria Golia’s full article yet, but will immediately. thanks for posting. a most important issue indeed.
Interesting and important. Tim Mitchell also notes in Rule of Experts that a) price controls were lifted on cash crops but not on grains, a policy that favoured larger agriculturalists, and b) terms of US aid required Egypt to open its market to the products of subsidized American agriculture. If I remember correctly he also mentions some sort of conditionality in USAID that requires Egypt to import a certain quantity of American wheat – ?
I don’t know that I agree with the emphasis on food self-sufficiency, in principle if the government keeps emergency food stocks they can be prepared for famines (though the point about farmers’ own food security is a good one). The problem of course is the unaccountable and repressive government that is more worried about keeping bread prices low to avoid urban riots than with what will become of farmers.
Until 2001 or 2002, the US had a privileged position as wheat exporter to Egypt. It ended with the sacking of the person who headed the institution that made purchasing decisions and was a clear break from at least a decade of purchasing policy that guaranteed big purchases from the US. The idea may have been to woo the opinions of politicians from big farming states in the US, or maybe just a government-to-government arrangement that stemmed out of the special relationship between Cairo and Washington. But it was a fact, and something that the French and Australians, among other major wheat growers, were pissed off about.
thanks for the posting Issandr. Crop management is a major issue in itself, but I wanted to concentrate on the felahin, as they are getting shafted in a big way and have virtually no one representing them. Anyone who’s interested in this should have a look at what the LAnd Center for Human Rights is doing: http://www.lchr-eg.org/eindex.htm – I learned about them from the arabist, so more thanks to Issandr – beyond this my next piece covers land reclamation itself. I think anyone who looks at the big picture of land use versus pop. growth and the prevailing style of buiilding/ development and says we have no land problems- is dreaming. Also it’s not just about land, but the interplay of land and water – Egypt is short on both counts….
[…] I’ve linked before to Maria Golia’s Daily Star columns, in which she’s currently exploring Egypt’s catastrophic and little-discussed land problems — the way it is administered, what’s being farmed on it, what’s being built on it, and what the government is doing about planning for the future of an ever scarcer resource. In her latest missive she takes another look and land reform, what’s being proposed and what’s (not) being done. Unfortunately, the Daily Star has recently started putting them behind a wall, so it’s reproduced below for your enjoyment. And remember to buy her book on your way out. The line between famine and abundance is clearly drawn in Egypt, a green vein of Nile-fed land surrounded by lifeless sand. Yet administrative and public denial of land and water shortages is nothing short of suicidal. Given accelerated unplanned growth, only a cathartic reassessment of Egypt’s situation coupled with comprehensive land reform can rescue this uniquely challenged nation from ruin. […]