Introduction

This chapter traces three dimensions of the political economy context for food security issues in the MENA region with particular emphasis on Egypt and Tunisia. It does so by tracing the ways in which conflict, economic and agrarian reform and environmental struggles have provided a politically and socially overdetermined context for understanding food and agricultural underdevelopment. Overdetermination refers to a myriad of contradictions in the conditions of existence of the complex whole of any social formation (Althusser 2005). The three themes raised here are seldom explored in relation to agricultural underdevelopment or the systemic way in which they are integral to the global capitalist system. Yet as we will highlight, the region is structured by wars and conflict, neo-liberal reform and environmental crises. These persistent features of the region have shaped the ways in which agrarian questions can and should be posed. Agrarian transition, the ways in which capital impacts and may transform rurality and shape food sovereignty takes place in the context of multiple and persistent deleterious factors. These result from the ‘globalised neo-liberal system’, and as we see throughout this book, confronting the development of global apartheid will require the emergence of new strategies for ‘Sovereign Popular Project[s] ’ (Amin, S. 2017a, 7, 13).

War and Conflict

The MENA region has experienced the highest number of international wars and civil conflict in any region in the world. MENA accounts for 40 per cent of total global battle-related deaths since 1946 and 60 per cent of all casualties since 2000. Between 1945 and 2015, 12 of the 59 conflicts in the MENA region lasted more than eight years each, and in half of these, peace lasted less than 10 years (Rother et al. 2016, 7). The cost of conflict and war has been and continues to be catastrophic for national development. Much of the destruction generated by conflict is the result of direct US and NATO military intervention and indirectly by the arms trade and Western funding of local reactionary surrogate forces. The IMF estimate, among other things, that Syria's GDP in 2015 was less than half the pre-conflict 2010 figure (Rother et al. 2016, 9).