Egypt and North Africa: The determining context of imperialist interests for agrarian change
Ray Bush
Agriculture in the Near East and North Africa (NENA) is shaped by family farming. Rural underdevelopment is determined by struggles over land access and ownership and devastating rural poverty. Yet there remains an absence of debate in the region about the involvement of farmers, families and households that help in the social reproduction of the village and community and those working off-farm for wages. Poverty, moreover, and the persistent politicisation of land are also rarely examined in historical perspective or within the context of Marxist political economy.
Critical agrarian studies remains preoccupied with debating agrarian questions. Sadly, it has become a discussion about how many angels you can get on a pin. How will peasant households resist capitalist encroachment, and will social differentiation lead to the death of the peasantry are debates that have been far less explored in NENA for reasons examined by Max Ajl. Ajl documented how and why the region has been excluded from many critical agrarian debates – although there are exceptions.
Ajl reflects on the (intentional) absences of analysis of the region and country case studies that have excluded the role of imperialism, ecological crisis and town-countryside dynamics. He also stressed the significance of land and struggles around access and ownership as embedded in the fight for national liberation. This was also in part a concern of Riachi & Martiniello who situate the region in the context of different historical world food regimes, while Ajl, Ayeb and Bush have documented how and why Western policy initiatives drive a pattern of underdevelopment even as the World Bank and other international financial institutions publicly declare a strategy to reduce environmental calamity and food crises.
Central to the most exciting analyses of food and farmer dynamics is activist research that locates contemporary analysis of agrarian transformation in the historiography of imperialism and the interrelationship between the international and the national and local (rural) processes and patterns of capital accumulation, class formation, and social (household) reproduction.
The need for this framing of agrarian transformation in NENA is starkly highlighted by Israel’s genocide in Gaza and carpet bombing of Lebanon – which among other things has decimated food production and social reproduction. Despite the theatrical handwringing to the contrary, the genocide is not possible without approval from the imperial triad – the US, EU (UK) and Japan.
NENA is structured by war and recurrent external interventions more than any other on the planet and it shapes agricultural production and the social reproduction of farmers. When Chayanov noted that peasants may well be impacted by capitalism, but not necessarily governed by it, he could not possibly have anticipated the role of destruction and chaos caused by the settler colonial incubus in Tel Aviv.
If the term ‘agrarian questions’ is now deployed it needs to be explored within the determining context of imperialist interests and the national liberation response. How farmers are impacted and how they mediate the extraordinary dynamics of international and local food regimes has been inched forward recently by Dixon in examining how the frontiers of corporate food have been engineered in Egypt and how they have changed over time. She has highlighted the vulnerabilities for consumers generated by the corporate food regime with its dependence upon oil-based energy. She highlights the role played in Egypt by popular struggles over land and rural livelihoods in shaping investor decisions regarding where to invest and in what types of land.
Egypt
Marion Dixon contributes to the most interesting and important analysis in and on Egypt that challenges the way Egyptian agriculture, and its problems, has been pathologized. For a generation, Egypt’s food and agricultural difficulties have been seen as a heady mix of too many people on too little land with access to limited water. To make matters worse, the family farmers and near landless are seen to employ backward production techniques. The declared government and international agency response continues as if straight from the modernisation theory playbook of the 1960s: remove all vestiges of historic state and public sector provision (especially any remnants from 1952-1991) and enhance neo-liberal market reforms which began in rural Egypt in the mid-1980s before IMF and World Bank adjustment in 1991.
The Government of Egypt is intent on eradicating Egypt’s family farmers and accelerating the growth of new entrepreneurial landowners. In this proposal, there is continuity between the policies of former President Hosni Mubarak and incumbent Abdel Fattah el-Sisi: land reclamation, encouragement for foreign investors and ruling party hacks with an emphasis on export production of high value, low nutritious foodstuffs but without support for 90% of Egyptian farmers who share just 50% of the total agricultural area averaging just 0.52 ha.
The divergence from the 30-year Mubarak dictatorship, that has emerged since Sisi’s presidency in 2014, is the dominant role played in land privatisation and growth of agricultural companies owned by the Egyptian military, foreign investors and state bodies and those close to the President. There is also collusion and support among international organisations and donors. Western policy hegemony may be less intense and obvious than it was in the 1990s when USAID was highly visible, but the push for market and state reforms and liberalisation continues, and with it, we see a massive increase in foreign debt.
President el-Sisi seems once more to have exacted a strategic rent from the imperial triad during the Gaza genocide. Egypt remains the gatekeeper of southern Gaza and the US continues support to and collusion with the regime’s abuse of human rights, accelerating the spread of military influence and access to international finance. The Government of Egypt’s declared and heralded liberalisation of planning and regulatory mechanisms has facilitated further, rather than less, opportunities for state accumulation with the persistent and entrenched marginalisation of family farming.
Egypt remains the world’s biggest importer of wheat ensuring dependence on international markets for food and other essential imports that ties the GoE into global patterns of accumulation as it simultaneously rewards local capitalist interests and the military as a corporate entity.
Agrarian questions in NENA and Egypt go beyond issues of agricultural production, circulation and distribution at the local and national level. They revolve around the ways in which social formations are unevenly incorporated into the historically structured world economy and how imperialism and its wars shape agriculture and food policy. After nearly a quarter of the 21st century, attempts to erase the significance of family farmers and agricultural labourers have failed. Imperialist intervention has shaped the arenas in which small-scale farmers dominate by trying to accelerate agricultural modernisation, land privatisation and export-oriented cash crop production. Yet farmer struggles to sustain strategies for self-provisioning and continued access to land, no matter how small the area may be, remains the primary battle for farmers. That conflict and the reasons for it can only be grasped when debating agrarian questions is structured by the role that imperialism plays in the region, why the genocide in Gaza is imperialism’s attempt to quell resistance and not just to Hamas but to all who oppose Washington’s ally and its occupation. The region’s US proxy drives a rationale for order, economic liberalisation and regional peace with local sympathetic autocratic regimes that legitimise war and its accompanying rural destruction and transformation.
Ray Bush is Emeritus Professor of African Studies and Development Politics at the University of Leeds and has worked extensively on the political economy of Africa and the Near East.
This is part of a series of specially curated blog posts in which authors are invited to reflect on the theme of ‘Agrarian Questions’, highlighting different, even novel, ways of interpreting and engaging with the core questions of agrarian political economy in different historical and contemporary contexts. The posts will be released over the coming months as part of the 25th year celebrations of the Journal of Agrarian Change. You can find the full series of blog posts here.
Image by Government Press Office via Flickr
