AN AGRICULTURAL STRATEGY WITHOUT FARMERS: EGYPT'S COUNTRYSIDE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

By Ray Bush

Source: Review of African Political Economy, Jun2000, Vol. 27 Issue 84, p235, 15p

This article argues that Egypt's countryside is at a turning point. The economic reforms have not delivered the intended improvements in production and yet there is little indication that the Government of Egypt (GoE) will manage to work with the IFIs to promote an alternative economic adjustment. The reforms began in Egypt's agricultural sector in the mid 1980s and were eventually matched in 1991 by an economic reform and structural adjustment programme (ERSAP) and a renewed programme with the IFIs in 1996. Macro-economic targets set by the IFIs have helped stabilise the economy, reduce government expenditure, inflation and budget deficits although large scale privatisation of state assets have failed to emerge and so too has significant economic growth (Pfeifer, 1999; Mitchell, 1999). Attention has particularly focused on price and marketing reforms in agriculture, on the slashing of subsidies and on the promotion of cash crops for export. Land reform, favouring landowners and marginalising tenant interests, has also been central to agricultural transformation. Sustained and diverse economic growth has eluded Egypt's economy. Unemployment remains a central problem exacerbated by the economic reforms as levels of rural and urban poverty have also risen.

The strategy for agricultural reform pursued by the IFIs and the GoE is flawed. It will not lead to sustained higher rates of agricultural output and greater food security and neither will it address environmental issues like water logging, salination and soil erosion. Instead, it will lead to greater rural inequality and the possibility of social unrest, as policy-makers refuse to talk with the people that are most affected by the economic reforms - the landless, near landless and tenants. Heightened class conflict between landlords and tenants has been evident in the struggles over the land tenancy law. While this unrest seems to be concentrated in only a minority of villages, perhaps 100 out of about 3,600, the level of repression that has been used to suppress opposition has been extraordinary, as has the collusion between landlords and security services and the absence of the rule of law.

Agricultural reform was certainly necessary, and so too was a proper reappraisal of the state's regulatory structures that desperately needed overhauling. These issues needed to be examined in an era of economic and political reform. The problem is the way in which they have been addressed by the GoE and IFIs and the assumptions they have made about the efficacy of the market and economic liberalisation to solve issues of agricultural productivity and sustainability.

It is also the case that the IFIs have failed to think through the possibility of alternative strategies of reform. They have instead, embraced unquestioningly the Washington consensus of liberalisation and deregulation while simultaneously keeping the political lid on liberalisation, openness, transparency and democratic governance. The GoE has accepted the menu of reform offered from Washington. Notwithstanding President Mubarak's rhetoric of opposition to the blanket implementation of the US led strategy, and the need for the 'Egyptianisation' of economic liberalisation, discussion within important ministries regarding how to implement reforms (including the pace of reform) has not been visible. The GoE has not addressed, and failed to promote, a viable alternative to structural adjustment. The failure to develop alternative strategies of economic reform and to engage with the specifics of the Egyptian countryside is particularly baffling when international criticism of the IFI strategies in the late 1990s has at times reached siren pitch. Criticism has been extensive. It has raised issues of the continued neo-liberal bias in World Bank and IMF models and it has criticised perceived collusion between the IFIs and the private banking sector in whose interest the international agencies are often perceived to work.

The 'big' IFI failures in Indonesia, Korea and Brazil sit uneasily alongside the continuity of IFI policy implementation either in terms of crisis management or longer term structural adjustment remedy. The continued application of neo-liberal orthodoxy in Egypt is also at odds with the declared jettisoning of the Washington consensus by the World Bank president John Wolfensohn as an 'open and ready-to-learn bank'.

There are two contradictions here. The first is the reluctance of the Bank itself to follow through with the announcements made in its World Development Report of 1997 (World Bank, 1997), namely the affirmation of the importance of states to development. Yet in Egypt there remains a clear view of the greater efficacy of private investment rather than public enterprise in promoting economic growth. And while it has also been asserted that where private investors remain hesitant about the area of public good provision, protecting and promoting environmental 'assets' among other things, the state should continue to have a role, there remains in Egypt, at least, the rhetoric to 'downsize' the role of government.

The second contradiction lies with the GoE itself. If there is now a possible window of opportunity to engage the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) with its own rhetoric of reform and to carve out a niche for government transformation, none seems to be taking place. Nowhere is this more evident than in the agricultural sector where the drive for market and price reform and the changes in tenure rights have and continue to rule supremely in the crudest neo-classical way.

And it is important to note that these two areas of contradiction, the failure of the World Bank to deliver, and to take a lead in delivering, a nuanced reform strategy and of the GoE to promote its own radical reforms, ignores any concern each institution may have with the need for accountability, openness, transparency and good governance. In Egypt, the IFIs may have colluded with the lack of transparency in government as it has suited their broad objectives of putting adjustment in place. While there has been criticism of the slow pace of reform, and particularly of the reluctance for the GoE to privatise state assets, the authoritarian regime can ensure that the economic reforms remain in place despite the increased levels of inequality and poverty that they have generated.

Instead of the agricultural reforms that are currently promoted I want to argue for the need to focus on what happens in the countryside during economic reform, and to listen to farmers and their families and to try to understand the dynamics of rural livelihoods. In short, I argue that the view of agricultural modernisation promoted in Egypt at the end of the 1990s and in the new millennium will too readily promote land consolidation (although this seems to be problematic as large land-owning families fight among themselves for land after Law 96) and rural unemployment. Moreover, this strategy runs alongside two other processes. The first of these is a historically naive view of development that is wedded to a sense that Egypt's problems stem from a fragile environmental base. The policies that follow from such a crude formulation of the country's problems are investments in large development projects seen recently in the hype over Tushka rather than a recognition that Egypt's problems actually stem from unequal access to national resources and uneven regional and capitalist development. The second process that has been running alongside economic reforms has been a 'deliberalisation' of the Egyptian political system and increased authoritarianism. This has been shown in a whole range of government measures but here I want to focus only on the implications that this authoritarianism has had for rural protest arising from Law 96 and the erosion of farmer rights: indeed the agricultural reform strategy that is currently promoted is a strategy to exclude farmers from historical farming rights.

Economic Reform in Agriculture

The detail of agricultural reform is known (USAID and GoE, 1995; Bush, 1998, 1999; Mitchell, 1998, 1999). Briefly, the strategy which has followed from the IFI's characterisation of Egypt's agricultural crisis is to raise productivity and rural incomes by divesting the state of previous duties and supporting the introduction of new land tenure legislation. Problems of declining levels of productivity and dependency upon food and agricultural imports are regarded as rooted in a history of excessive state intervention, an intervention considered either inefficient (because of its rent seeking) or corrupt.

The strategy, therefore, has been to liberalise markets and free prices while seeking comparative advantage in export markets for cotton and cash crops, fruit and vegetables. Policymakers have also argued for the increased application of new technologies to raise yields and improved opportunities for agribusiness. According to USAID, Egypt has a niche in supplying markets in the production of high value, low nutrition foodstuffs especially for Europe - strawberries, fine green beans, peppers and tomatoes, as well as grapes, peaches and other citrus crops. This is also the view of the Shura Council (2000) but the authors of the recent Shura Council Report have been underwhelmed by Egypt's export performance.

The modernisation of Egyptian agriculture is now shaped to meet conditions of scale economies and technical efficiency. These have lead policy-makers to promote standardisation of farm units by reducing the viability of smallholdings and changing tenancy rights. The standardisation of rural units of production which will result from increased social differentiation meets two needs of policymakers - one of which is unstated. The undeclared aim is the need to continue a pattern of rural social order which does not effectively challenge the status quo. While the reforms to tenant-landlord relations challenge the well being of poorer peasants in a more serious way than ever before, they are offset by the rhetoric that price reforms compensate for increased costs of inputs and land, although there is no evidence of this and too little government provision to prevent the undermining of poor farmer livelihoods.

Economic reforms in agriculture have been hailed as a success (Fletcher, 1996; Faris & Khan, 1993). Yet while there have been changes in cropping patterns and liberalisation of input and output prices the desired level of growth in the sector has not been met, indeed agricultural growth since 1990 has been less than for the period 1980-1987. There has also been a dramatic increase in agricultural imports the demand for which is inelastic compared with Egypt's exports that have fallen in recent years. Most Egyptian agricultural imports include commodities characterised by low elasticity of demand, like wheat, sugar and edible oils. In contrast, most of Egypt's exports are marked by elasticity. While agricultural exports may have increased from LE418 million in 1980 to just under LE1.9 in 1998, agricultural imports for the same period ballooned from LE1.2 billion in 1980 to LE11 billion in 1998. In fact, agricultural exports fell from US$615.5 million 1994/95 to $320.7 million 1995/ 1996. Agriculture contributed in 1998 to 33 per cent of Egypt's trade deficit. While there remains intense optimism regarding Egypt's horticultural export potential, more than a decade of liberalisation has failed to deliver export driven growth. In 1998 Egypt produced an estimated 21 million tons of horticultural crops of which only 5 per cent was exported (figures from Shura Council Report, cited in Al Ahram Weekly, 13-19 January 2000; see also Baroudi, 1993).

There seem to be real problems with Egypt's agricultural strategy. It has led to higher levels of rural poverty (Fergany, 1998); insignificant increases in production, much of which has been generated by farmer strategies for improving yields and changing cropping patterns rather than increases in farmgate prices; and poor export performance. This strategy has led, in one estimate, to the loss of 700,000 agricultural jobs in the period 1990/1995 (Fergany, 1998; and Shura Council report, cited in Al Ahram Weekly, 19-25 December 1996).

Struggles Over Land & Tenancy

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the liberalisation of Egypt's countryside has been the implementation of Law 96 of 1992. This law reversed Nasser's rather limited land reform measures which had tried to keep a lid on the size of land holdings held by a politically and economically strong pasha class. In return for political compliance, tenant farmers were granted rights in perpetuity and legal status for their landholdings. Rents were also fixed and for the first time smallholders received security; this security ended and the insecurity of the pre-revolutionary period returned in 1997. After a five-year transitional period, and to the absolute astonishment of tenant farmers throughout Egypt, Law 96 ended security of tenure for farmers, gave landowners (most of whom are absentees) the right to levy rents at 'market' rates and allowed (unwritten) contracts to last for 12 months only; in reality these contracts can be and are, in many circumstances, revoked without notice.

Law 96 satisfies the dual concerns of, first, delivering the idea that increases in rents will improve incentives to invest in land (although the logic of this is not spelt out and neither is the economic rationale) and, second, sustaining the financial interests of those who sit in the Egyptian Parliament and more broadly in the GoE (Saad, 1999). Law 96 has led to widespread dispossessions, increased levels of poverty and rural indebtedness and increased desire by younger family members of ex-tenants to migrate for work. It has also generated a new type of indentured labour. This is not the free wage labour created by the market expansion of rural capitalism; it is the enforced hiring of labour, drawn from a new lumpen rural proletariat, under extreme conditions of economic and social duress.

And there are other issues created by the enforcement of Law 96. A recent report prepared by the Land Centre for Human Rights documents the extensive level of violence in Egypt's countryside relating to the implementation of the law. It focuses on incidents of violence for the period 1998-1999 and includes many cases that date from 1997. The violence has led to at least 87 deaths, 545 casualties and 798 arrests. Contrary to the view expressed by state-controlled media and the Ministry of Agriculture, the levels of violence relating to the implementation of the Act has not subsided since its implementation in 1997. Indeed there is strong evidence, documented by LCHR, that the violence used by security forces to ensure the implementation of the Act has increased. Opposition to the Act has also been sustained since 1997. Whilst this opposition has not been in the form of the mass organised protest which emerged in some locations during the transition period 1992-1997, many farmers and dispossessed have challenged the law and the actions of the security forces and landowners in the courts. They have also used local forms of protest against landowners and Government authorities.

The most noteworthy feature of the way in which the Act has been enforced has been the continued abuse of the human rights of farmers, an increasingly institutionalised use of torture and unlawful imprisonment of tenants who challenge Law 96. This undermines the notion that in Egypt civil and political rights are equally guaranteed for all. While most debate in Egypt focuses on whether or not there is a civil society and on the nature of legal rights in urban areas, there has been little discussion about political and civil rights in the countryside. In this regard, it is clear that the Government of Egypt is still falling short of safeguarding or promoting civil and political rights.

There continues to be extensive and routine abuse of farmer human rights. There is the widespread scandal of violence promoted by security forces, of the collusion between landowners and police and the increasing use by landowners of militias and armed thugs to intimidate, threaten and beat tenants in the process of getting them to submit to Law 96. The level of mistrust of the security forces and the level of corruption experienced by farmers is extensive. So too is the insecurity which the level of violence has generated through the widespread use of both state (public) and private terror, in particular the use of hired thugs acting for the landowners. It is clear that economic reform in Egypt's countryside has been used as a vehicle to promote and entrench landed interests. The process of the consolidation (in some cases the establishment for the first time) of extensive economic and political control by landlords over farmers indicates that fellahin are not free from physical violence or the threat of it. There is no effective and equal protection of the freedom of movement, expression, association and assembly and farmers are not free from harassment and intimidation in working to improve their social and economic rights. There is also little evidence that government is ready to remedy publicly identified problems and that resolving rural conflict peacefully is not a priority.

Amongst other things these failings challenge the Government of Egypt's commitment to its ratification of the UN Convention on Civil and Political Rights. Law 96 has opened a pandora's box of claims and counter-claims relating to ownership and control of many types of landholding. The Law has led to at least eight types of conflict: expulsions, contested ownership rights, Awgaf [what is an Awgaf?] endowed disputes, agrarian reform land disputes, alluvial land disputes, conflict over dwellings on farmlands, disputes about boundaries, irrigation disputes, and violence linked to the increased impoverishment of farmers - including murder, livestock theft and debt.

The increased impoverishment of tenants has sparked considerable opposition to the law. It is a protest that the GoE may well have thought was less dramatic than feared but which to its probable surprise has been sustained for much longer than may have been initially envisaged. Opposition to the Act has varied between farmers 'weeping for Abdel Nasser' even though many had never known his regime (Guardian, 7 October 1997); using the legal system to oppose the constitutionality of the law and resisting working for landlords who kicked farmers off 'their' land. Unrest has been considerable and the might of security forces has been used regularly by over-zealous Governors eager to prove the suitability of their 'no nonsense' tactics to crush it. Opposition to the land act was written up by government as acts of 'lawlessness'. In so doing the GoE and much of the semi-official press was guilty of marginalising opposition and often reducing it to 'terrorism' rather than legitimate acts of political opposition to what was seen as an unjust law.

The issue of privatisation of land tenure has become central to the economic reform process. There is little evidence, moreover, that acts of opposition to the Land Act have diminished since October 1997 although the form they have taken may have changed from open anger to more peaceful use of the courts and covert struggles. Yet getting an accurate account of the levels of unrest and opposition remains difficult because it is not something officials want to publicise. Part of the reason behind farmer changes in tactics recognises the strength of the security forces and the ability and confidence of landowners to have them at their disposal. Changes in land tenancy arrangements has generated winners and losers. The winners are landowners renting out land and farmers with more than five feddan who can afford to pay increased rents and more easily make decisions about changes in cropping patterns that might generate increased income. Fellahin (small peasant farmers) that are near landless, who before 1997 were able to rent in land are now the class of farmers that are more likely to be dispossessed at the time when opportunities for off-farm income are diminishing.

The GoE seems to have been mindful of the implications for rural protest but successful implementation of the act became a measure of GoE authority, its ability to deliver tough reforming legislation. Nevertheless, opposition has been stronger than GoE probably imagined. And that opposition became more than a criticism of a state uninterested in its farmers. It became, by early 1999, a recognition by tenants and other small landholders, that landlords were using the new law as a pretext to contest a whole range of land ownership issues. One of the possible consequences of the rush for land made by landlords and families still bearing grudges at Nasser's (limited) redistributive reforms is a consolidation of power by landlords. Changing the class status of the large landholders, enhancing and in some cases establishing, for the first time, obvious and real sources of economic power in the countryside, may polarise village and household differences and claims to local resources. Changes in tenure and higher rents is leading to greater social differentiation and rural landlessness resulting from dispossession of small holders not absorbed by urban growth. The policy reforms also assume crop mix and levels of production will be ipso facto appropriate for redressing the relationship between population growth and food production. But farmers, like everyone else, are averse to taking risks and shun uncertainty. Yet it is precisely this that the GoE has forced on tenant farmers. Farmers express widespread fear regarding their income-earning opportunities now that many are denied access to lands farmed for more than a generation.

Violent opposition from tenants after mid-1997 seemed most evident in Governorates where there were large land holdings as in Kafr el Sheikh and Dakhalia which posed particular problems. The Districts of Dekerniss and Madenet el-Nasser were extremely tense in early 1997 as a handful of large landowners tested the efficacy of the land law. Yet despite the declared fears of many tenants of a return to feudalism, Mahmoud Heikal, the head of the local council in Madenet Nasser noted that the new law was fair, and that the tenants needed to thank God for the very many years that they had paid only nominal rent.

In July 1997 security forces and government commentators began claiming that rural opposition to the new act originated from 'elements that want to destabilise the situation and take advantage of the farmers' discontent' (Al Ahram Weekly, 10-16 July 1997). Characteristically, government officials attributed the cause of violence to Islamists. Disturbances near Beni Suef at the end of June 1997, when a local agricultural co-operative was burnt to the ground, were blamed on members of the Islamist Labour Party and the failure of local ruling National Democratic Party representatives to explain the law properly to peasants. Major General Mahmoud Ramzi, assistant security chief of Beni Suef, noted that he had advance warning of Islamist attempts to incite a disturbance but that 'knowing the peaceful nature of peasants, we did not wish to interfere and frighten them' but the (Islamist) Labour party 'took advantage of their naive nature [sic] and their attachment to the land to spread misleading information about the law' (Al Ahram Weekly, 10-16 July 1997). Violent protest and violent dispossession and arrest continued in 1998 however. That included areas in Faiyum, Luxor, Sharkia, Mounifia and Giza. In all these Governorates the use of security forces were used promoting the interests of landowners against legal tenants before disputes had been properly resolved by the courts.

Despite mounting rural opposition, the GoE failed to confront issues that have so vexed tenants and rural communities more generally - namely a perceived renewed order of landlordism. The GoE portrayal of rural discontent being whipped up by terrorist sympathisers, thereby making farmer resistance an issue of law and order rather than criticism of government policy, does not stand up to scrutiny. Yet as the Land Center has indicated, the level of violence relating to land disputes following Law 96 continues and with it has been pressure on village communities in the form of increased economic hardship and (often) increases in theft.

Future discussion may focus on the extent to which many of the diverse struggles over land become part of an ongoing and uncoordinated political struggle demanding improved structures of governance and greater farmer representation. There has been the GoE Shorouk initiative for integrated rural development driven by UNDP and donor concern for better rural representation. Shorouk has intended to close the development gap between urban and rural areas by improving local resource use and improved performance of government and non-governmental local institutions. It has been very ambitious in its declared aims and objectives. It was launched in 1994 with a view to including all Egyptian villages by 2002. Its planned life span is until 2017 and it has four main development areas of infrastructure: human resource development, economic development and institutional development. Yet while the language of the programme has been that of 'popular participation' and 'providing democratic channels for the participation of the rural population in the decision making process' (Institute of National Planning, 1996:85), there is little by way of hard evidence to suggest it is delivering the even limited governance and institutional opportunities for farmers to voice out their concerns to GoE. A major difficulty with delivering anything along the lines of greater rural participation is GoE resistance in converting rhetoric into effective policy. On paper, the Shorouk initiative seems to hit all the right participatory buttons. In the countryside, there has been little evidence of mobilisation and popular participation.

Rural Transformation

The intention, as we have noted, was for the economic reforms in agriculture to promote increases in productivity, greater security of tenancy and rural stability. In contrast rural Egypt since 1997 has been characterised by increasing farmer debt; the struggle within large landholding families for access to a piece of land - the spoils of Law 96 (and therefore perhaps the failure to promote land consolidation as intended by the Act), labour relations based on coercion akin to indentured labour and decline in school enrolment as previously tenanted families, and especially those womenheaded households, removed children from school to reduce livelihood expenses. In addition to this dynamic of change, perhaps best characterised by what Polanyi called the 'tyranny of the market' (1957) there have also been the promotion of classical survival strategies of the poor. These have included changes in diets and food purchases to economise on household expenses; extra labour time associated with searching for cheaper food in the souk and sales of livestock, jewellery and other household assets. Many tenants who had livestock before 1997 continue to live on the savings of earlier sales or continue to share livestock with neighbours grazing on a reduced area where berseem (fodder) might still be grown. The most difficult time for these households is in many respects yet to come, as savings from previous sales dwindle, a problem compounded by the loss of the nutritional value of access to milk and cheese. Their survival options thereafter force them (where possible) onto the labour market, with all its vagaries.

We can now look at just two cases that illustrate the difficulties resulting from recent reforms. They are taken from a village in Giza and one in Dakhalia.

Case One

Aziza is 40 and she has two sons aged 12 and 11 and a daughter aged 14 years; her husband died in 1995. Before the land act Aziza rented one feddan (1 feddan =1.038 acres or 0.42 hectares)access to which was inherited from her husband who died in 1995. Net income from all sources was LE6965. The tenanted land was in the village and she had two water buffaloes and a donkey. She had grown clover, vegetables and corn throughout the year and hired in labour at peak times. She had heard about the Land Law from the owner at the time of her husband's death. There had been no visit from either government or governorate officials to discuss the implications of the law.

After the land act her tenancy agreement was not renewed. The landowner raised the rent from LE720 per feddan to LE2400 and she was conscious that the returns from farming were, in fact, declining. If she had resources to renew the contract it had to be paid in full at the beginning of the rental arrangement. There was to be no written contract only a verbal agreement; the landowner, in fact, refused to rent the piece of land to any farmer from the village. The landowner had also said that there would be no contract with a woman; she sold her livestock.

Emergence of Poverty: Credit from the agricultural bank was now substituted by credit from relatives. She also relied on relatives to look after the children. Small loans of LE25-50 replaced loans of LE500-600 from the agricultural bank. Before the act she had also borrowed from merchants who required that she sold her produce to them. She removed her daughter from school who now helped her mother sell vegetables bought from merchants in the village. Aziza became partly dependent upon the charity Society for the Care of Orphans and she also began working as a day labourer picking vegetables. She had sold milk while her livestock were alive, also benefiting from household consumption of cheese and milk but she was now entirely dependent upon being hired by other landowners.

Case Two

Suzanne is 50 and has four sons and a daughter. Only one son is at home; he is 27 and lives with his wife who is 18 years. Two are married and one has not returned from Iraq where he began work before the Gulf War. Before the land act Suzanne rented 1.5 feddans that was inherited from her husband who had been dead for several years. Gross income from the rented land was about LE6420 and rent was LE900; net income was LE2307. The tenanted land was in the village and she had been devastated when she heard about the proposed land act from a neighbour in 1992. She had not been visited by any government or agricultural extension officer to discuss the impending loss of her tenancy and the NDP official who had been contacted by villagers refused to visit the village saying he was too busy.

After the land act was implemented, Suzanne could not renew her tenancy agreement. The landlord insisted that he wanted to rent the land to farmers from outside the village - to merchant traders who planted vegetables and sold them in a nearby village. Suzanne had been intimidated by the landlord who threatened her and her family with the violence that had been directed to eight other villagers who had been detained and tortured. As a result of this threat she instructed her son to stay in a local town in case he was arrested. She managed to get a verbal contract for a sharecropping arrangement on a piece of land of 1.5 feddan five kilometres away from the village. She took a quarter of the crop and paid for labour hire at peak times. The landowner paid for other farming inputs and insisted on the cropping pattern of cotton and rice. The landowner only agreed to a summer sharecrop arrangement when labour input is greater. He farmed the land himself in winter.

Emergence of Poverty: Suzanne moved from a situation of a net income of LE2307 per annum to a deficit of LE2923. She was only able to get credit after the Land Act from merchants who lent on the understanding that they could purchase her crops at less than the market price. Before the Land Act she had received credit from banks against the collateral of her tenancy. The village now experienced an increase in sharecropping, notably during summer periods when landowners were confronted by higher labour needs. Contracts for access to land were only oral and landowners insisted on blank cheques from tenants or sharecroppers as leverage to remove them from the land at the end of a season.

Both these women have seen a dramatic decline in their economic and social rights following 1997 and they are not the worst cases. Previously with land, security, collateral and opportunity to sustain their families and themselves they have been coerced into livelihoods that were intended to raise agricultural productivity, promote agricultural modernisation and rural development. In both cases they have led to insecurity and the downward spiral to poverty - and there is no vibrant support mechanism that they can use to promote their rights.

Agricultural Modernisation - An Alternative

Central to the debate about agricultural reform in Egypt is what type of agricultural modernisation should the country pursue. On this issue Egyptian policy-makers are guilty of a failure of imagination. It is clear from the characterisations of agricultural 'decline' and 'crisis' (two often-repeated terms in describing Egypt's agriculture) that what is believed to be at stake is nothing short of the task of bringing the countryside into the modern era. This has been a preoccupation with commentators. One of the most widely read books on Egypt notes, in its introductory chapter on the country's land and people, that 'isolationism and conservatism were the mainstays of fellah existence'. And, while the author observes that, 'paradoxically though, the fellah has easily adapted to the most advanced methods of cultivation' these were brought to the peasant by his (sic) 'city brothers'. 'Nonetheless,' he writes, 'the fellah continued to construct his views and images of the universe, the mystery of life, and his relation to both of these through the earth and the mighty river' (Vatikiotis, 1991:7). This view of Egypt's peasantry has done much to undermine rural people's inventiveness and the struggles that have sustained and promoted farmer abilities to transform their environments. It is a mistake to lay the blame for Egypt's agricultural crisis at the door of peasant households. For while Vatikiotis is not alone in noting that 'conservatism and insularity are manifested in the social practices of villagers, in their attachment to old agricultural methods, in their patience in adversity that derives from religious belief' (1991:9) it remains an ahistorical view lacking analytical rigour. It leads Vatikiotis to the view that 'conservatism, isolation and a long established traditional social structure comprise what one might call Egypt's permanent 'Egyptianity' [sic]' (1991:9).

This view of Egyptian peasants and farmers is shared and built into policy planners strategies for agricultural reform. It is in many ways a strategy for reform that excludes the peasant from the policies for modernisation. This is for two reasons. The continued absence of any political mechanism to facilitate the flow of information and grievance from the countryside to policy-makers locally at Governorate or sub-Governorate level or at the centre of the state. The second reason is because of the dominant view of agricultural modernisation.

The continued absence of political mechanisms to include peasants into the formulation of policy or even for an arena in which peasant problems can be expressed remains a block to agricultural reform. Despite contemporary debates about the need for effective civil society and its relationship to political and economic liberalisation, Egyptian peasants have no voice to express their views. Instead, policies are directed to the dramatised concerns of environmental degradation and declining productivity which are seen to have been caused by the peasant producer. Farmers however identify the obstacles to productivity and modernisation as being unequal access to land and farming inputs at costs that can be borne during a period of crisis. They also relate to issues of rural infrastructure, employment and notably educational opportunities for their children.

The IFI and GoE preoccupation with the market as Egypt's saviour is misguided and self-serving of the larger farmer and state official interests that want to sustain the status quo. That is a status quo that has already promoted a considerable concentration of land holdings that began prior to economic adjustment. Between 1961-1982, for example, the amount of leased and rented land fell from 40 per cent to 25 per cent. That meant that some 900,000 feddans passed from the hands of tenants into the hands of big landlords - the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation accounting for 16.4 per cent of that land. While the declared rationale of policy is to release the energy and vibrancy of newly burgeoning entrepreneurial forces, the outcome will merely be to further empower those landowners and political forces which already exert authority in the countryside and in the state machine. And there is little to suggest that the release of market forces will do anything in itself to reduce the level of state rent seeking that has characterised Egyptian politics for so long.

An alternative strategy for economic reform and agricultural transformation will be to recognise that the market per se is an inadequate instrument for economic growth. Markets are arenas of economic and political power. They empower as well as marginalise and while changing farm-gate prices remains the preferred tool of reformers it will not serve to promote sustainable growth. The reification of the market, marginalises all other policy initiatives for reform. Egyptian policymakers, for example, have singularly failed to learn any historical lessons from the newly industrialised countries in Asia that built their growth on land reform (of the more equitable variant) and protected local markets from the vagaries of changes in international crop prices. It is seen to be easier politically and practically more efficient, to promote urban growth which extends urban interests rather than promote mechanisms for rural empowerment, effective decision making and efficient allocation of resources in the countryside. The empowerment of rural actors needs investment in rural infrastructure, roads, telecommunications, health and education. Yet investment in these areas is often difficult to promote when the guiding view of modernity is urban rather than rural, industrial rather than agricultural. With a crude view of modernisation that seeks to continually channel resources into towns and cities rather than villages and rural households, there is little hope of effective and sustainable rural growth.

With the promotion of urban bias the GoE and the IFIs fail once again to recognise the relative ease with which poverty alleviation and economic growth can be met by promoting policies favouring the countryside rather than the increased levels of investment targeted to the towns and cities. Planners have ignored the view that 'a dollar of rural income, compared with a dollar of urban income, has three or four times the effect on poverty alleviation' (Timmer, 1995:461). And there has been little recognition, either, of the problems posed by the many labour migrants moving from the underdevelopment of Egypt's countryside to the cities to find work and use urban services. This failure has been an even bigger omission by policy-makers at a time of Islamist opposition. Although there is no simple one-to-one relationship between support for the agenda of radical Islam, on the one hand, and increased rural poverty, on the other, it would be likely that Islamist recruitment would increase as poverty intensified - if Islamists had effective political structures of recruitment and were sympathetic to rural interests and needs. In practice, however, the Islamist 'strategy' of violence, without widespread organic links with the rural poor proved as effective in preventing the spread of radical Islam as Mubarak's security forces.

There seems to be a strategic amnesia among policy-makers and advisors in Egypt with regard to agricultural development. The market is seen to have single-handedly delivered agricultural growth and increased productivity in the agricultural revolutions of Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries and the US after World War Two. Yet in both these cases the market was peripheral to growth. In both cases, and elsewhere more recently in South East Asia, agricultural growth was the outcome of protected markets and active state intervention to preserve and defend and then to extend agricultural interests. The idea that the Egyptian state can now simply reduce its considerable activities and that the result will be sustained agricultural growth is untenable - at least if levels of rural welfare are not to continue to fall as dramatically as they have since 1991. For while the rationale is for the release of market forces to increase the effective use of land and thereby increase yields and the demand for rural labour as agricultural output increases, there has been little indication from any sources that this is happening. Indeed, the pressures on rural welfare levels have been intense: charges for education and health services have risen and the costs of rural inputs have outstripped gains from increases in farm gate prices - particularly for smaller land holders, whose vulnerability to price changes is greater than larger land holders. The effects of these pressures on the ability of the rural poor to cope with declining levels of welfare is likely to undermine the reform strategy - not least because, to take rural education as an example, the impact of increasing levels of poverty has led to families to withdraw children from school. This will condemn society to low productivity agricultural workers or, if they leave the countryside, to low productivity urban workers or the unemployed marginalised.

It is on the issue of land however, that the government has singularly failed to grasp the nettle of reform. The recent land law will only reinforce the interests of large landowners, promote speculation and landlessness. And while the government is committed to resettling expelled farmers on land reclaimed from the desert, the cost to the farmers of cultivating that land, and of the social and cultural disruption caused by relocation, is likely to prohibit its success.

What the GoE could have done, instead, is to promote a ceiling on land holdings above five feddans. There might be exceptions in the case of the new land, or where large scale cultivation produces selected crops which are important for strategic purposes and for foreign exchange. But unless ceilings are otherwise placed on land, pressures in the Delta and elsewhere will undermine the viability of agricultural modernisation. It is essential, if agricultural modernisation is to be effective and sustainable, for it to be able to work with household farming practices, the skills and methods of crop choice and the labour processes of farmers in their familial and village relationships. Agricultural modernisation imposed or shaped by government decree or market forces alone will impose a harsh regime and protracted hardship on farmers, and will bring to the fore class antagonisms that even the authoritarian state might have difficulty overcoming without continued resort to emergency legislation and further abuse of human rights.

If the history of Egypt has taught us anything, it is that the agricultural sector has managed to 'deliver the goods' despite, rather than because of, state intervention. While state reforms in agriculture are desirable (in facilitating infrastructural growth, moderating prices and incentive structures and creating an easier relationship between urban and rural workers), it is the farmers themselves who have sustained the viability of production. It is the peasant farmers who must be listened to and who must not be hindered from providing the agricultural output that will sustain urban development and national economic growth. That growth will only be sustainable if a ceiling of 5 feddan is placed on land holdings. This is a viable land holding for average families. Moreover, it would block or slow the growth of an extractive class of rural landowners or absentee landlords, who will undoubtedly emerge from, and be reinvigorated by, government strategy.

A redistributive land reform is not on the political agenda. And many observers would see its suggestion as preposterous. The alternative, however, is the promise of accelerated rural social differentiation and the failure of urban economic growth to absorb rural unemployment. It is utopian to imagine that national economic growth will create employment for the more than 500,000 new entrants to the labour market each year. And while it might be seen to be equally utopian to suggest a land reform which would attack the vested interests of the holders of state power and their rural intermediaries, it is time that a debate highlighted what the probable outcome of the current strategy will be and why Egypt's political and economic future will continue to lie in the hands of its farmers. Without that debate, and without placing on the agenda the issue of peasant political and economic rights, the collusion between the IFIs and GoE will merely postpone rather than prevent the possibilities of social conflict and political opposition to the state.

The start of a new strategy for rural development might begin by de-emphasising supply side issues - or the stock of Egypt's environmental (natural) assets - and begin with the demand side of the equation, namely the quality of rural peoples' livelihoods (Redclift, 1992; Redclift and Sage, 1994; Redclift and Benton, 1994). Redclift for example, has shown the importance of understanding environmental concerns as part of agricultural policy and involving 'local people in policy objectives which they have had no real opportunity to influence' (Redclift, 1992;256). This is not a particularly new idea but it reminds us of the importance of understanding rural politics, of the way in which it is constructed and the way in which rural poor formulate their interests. Opportunities for doing this in Egypt are minimal.

A new agricultural strategy requires a proper assessment of what factors contribute to social inequality. These factors include differential access to resources, their productive capabilities and an indication of how these may change over time. This then provides a map of issues which can help inform policy-makers of the way in which they can prevent poverty creating destitution: it will primarily require the IFIs and the GoE to understand the mechanisms of rural decision making (Dasgupta, 1993; Desai, 1992). Dasgupta has also noted that there are many mechanisms of dispossession including shifts in population size and density and predatory governments and 'thieving aristocracies' (Dasgupta, 1993:292).

The GoE and the IFls are unable and unwilling to grasp the reality of rural struggles in Egypt because to do so would challenge the status quo. It would also require them to think about the problems of peoples' vulnerability to economic change and about how the market, on its own, cannot protect the poor. The GoE and the IFIs do not have a theoretical perspective which can recognise the importance of understanding the ways in which farmers live. Fundamentally what is happening in Egypt's countryside is a change in peoples' entitlements to rural assets and thereby their ability to withstand the acutest form of vulnerability: destitution.

Egyptian agriculture is now at a turning point. It is a turning point that will in all likelihood lead to increasing rural social differentiation that will fundamentally undermine the possibilities for the rural poor to continue to eke out an existence in the way that they have done since the 1950s. 'Safety nets' are now being taken away. Market liberalisation is further monetising the rural economy in ways that will make standards of living almost entirely dependent upon access to the cash economy. Yet the market economy, especially at a time of economic contraction, penalises most those with limited financial resources or access to cash.

Market driven solutions to Egypt's problems neglect the existing ways in which rural people address their uneven access to resources. There is little attention paid to the way in which people cope with crisis and the impact of market failure. The international agencies work with an incomplete characterisation of poverty and environmental degradation. Among other things, they have linked poverty to environmental degradation too simply and crudely. They have focused on notions of peasant ignorance and poor technology; and they regard common resource management as an anachronism. Policy-makers have failed to consider deeper issues of land reform and socio-political change which might include even limited empowerment for farmers to shape and promote their own agendas for reform. In doing so, they throw away a great opportunity during the present period of transformation to address political questions with which the GoE is unwilling to engage.

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