Politics, power and poverty: twenty years of agricultural reform and market liberalisation in Egypt

Diagnosis and Challenges of Sustainable Agricultural Development in Egypt

“…Since rural development is intended to reduce poverty, it must be clearly designed to increase production and raise productivity. However, improved food supplies and nutrition, together with basic services such as health and education, would not only improve the physical well-being and quality of life of the Source UNDP Egypt Human Development Report in 1990Report in , 1996Report in -1997Report in , 2001Report in , 2002Report in -2003Report in , 2004Report in , 2008Report in , and 2010 rural poor, but could also, indirectly, enhance their productivity and their ability to contribute to the national economy (Bush 2007). Rural development is a strategy designed to improve the economic and social life of the rural poor.…”

Ways In and Out of Vulnerability to Climate Change: Abandoning the Mubarak Project in the Northern Nile Delta, Egypt

“…With more than half of all land farmed by tenants at the time of Nasser's reform, it amounted to a thorough reorganization of property relations. Moreover, agricultural cooperatives under the tutelage of the state assisted farmers with seeds, fertilizers, credits, marketing and advice on cropping patterns (Bush 2007, 2009; Farah 2009).…”

“…Agricultural cooperatives were to be downgraded or dissolved, subsidies on fertilizers and other inputs reduced or eliminated, and Nasser era limits on land ownership scrapped. The aim of the sweeping counter‐reform was to pave the way for capital‐intensive farms, redirecting the agricultural sector towards export (Bush 2002b, 2007, 2009; Mitchell 2002; World Bank 2001).…”

“…Large swathes of the Delta have now been returned to big landlords. In the late 1960s, Nasser lowered the ownership limit to 50 feddan (1 feddan=1.038 acres); nowadays, agribusiness companies frequently own farms of more than 10,000 feddan, rarely without patronage from the highest echelons of the state apparatus (Bush 2007; Farah 2009; Mitchell 2002; Sfakianakis 2002). In 1997, there were one million tenant farmers, each supporting around nine family members—all in all, nearly a tenth of the population—farming a fourth of all Egyptian farmland: plunged into landlessness and despair, this rural lumpenproletariat has been reduced to an utterly insecure existence at the mercy of landowners (Bush 2002b).…”

Islamically marked bodies and urban space in two egyptian films

“…On Egypt's own experience with necliberalism, see Mitchell (2002) and Bush (2007). Both Mitchell and Klein show that the inconsistencies in implementing economic liberalization programs (contraventions cf the "pure philosophy" of liberalism) are pervasive and systematic.…”