Forty years ago, Colin Leys asked “how far the class that has the greatest interest in surmounting and resolving the problems confronting capitalist development … [has] identified these problems or shown itself able to tackle them?” An examination of the business response in four African countries (Kenya, Uganda, Botswana and South Africa) to two kinds of crises (HIV/AIS and political violence) provides surprising answers: African businesses can be key responders to crisis, on occasion responding well in advance of the state and in welfare-enhancing ways that assist the society more widely to resolve the underlying crisis. Large, home-grown, diversified business groups are prominent in the ranks of the constructive responders to crisis, acting in surprising and counterintuitive ways.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Southern Africa is perhaps the world’s deadliest. Again, despite highly contrasting responses by the national governments of South African and Botswana respectively, there were significant similarities in how the private sector actors in these two countries responded to that epidemic. While many (if not most) firms provided little by way of a constructive response to the epidemic, a number of high-profile firms, notably within the mining and financial subsectors, rolled out a variety of remarkably constructive responses to the epidemic, programmes that at their most comprehensive included the provision of free antiretroviral drugs to their staff, and support for broader societal initiatives to combat the epidemic.

Introduction

This book explores the political economy of agriculture and farming in Egypt and Tunisia. It highlights the economic and political significance that smallscale family farming has had historically in these countries and with reference to the wider MENA region. We document many of the pressures and constraints that farmers have had to deal with and we examine the myriad and largely negative policy interventions that have undermined, and often displaced, families and communities with little provision and opportunity for alternative non-agricultural livelihoods. We go further, however, than most analyses of the region, by locating investigation of the uneven consequences for farmers and the abjection that many have experienced, by understanding the impact as part of the way Egypt and Tunisia have been adversely incorporated into the world economy.

Egyptian and Tunisian agriculture has been structured by the interactions between global food regimes and local agricultural systems. This book helps to identify the social actors and conflicts that emanate from and shape these relations and contradictions. Our approach contrasts markedly with mainstream commentary on the MENA region. Although food security has been a major issue in the MENA region since World War II, it has been debated without reference to the producers of food, the farmers and fellahin (fellah singular or fellahin plural refers in the Arab world, but mostly in Egypt, to a peasant or agricultural labourer).

We also highlight how food security has been defined in a very limited and narrow sense that has restricted the opportunities for farmers to be part of a project that ensures the poor can access affordable food at all times.

We account for how the local food system is also the product of, and in turn influences, broad patterns and processes of local and national political economy, as well as structures of the global food regime. Egypt, for example, is second only to Indonesia in its dependency upon imported wheat. An appreciation of global pressures that shape the possibilities for grain imports is an important ongoing dynamic in Egyptian and broader MENA politics. Food security issues have shaped Egyptian state policy since President Abdul Nasser in the 1950s. His consummate political skill ensured that Egypt benefited from its geostrategic rent by playing off the United States and Soviet Union as suppliers of grain.

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).

Introduction

This chapter explores the social, economic and political origins of the revolutionary process that toppled Ben Ali from power on 14 January 2011 in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011 in Egypt. Their ouster shook the foundations of other regional autocracies. Unlike most commentary on the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, we focus on the role played by rural-social classes, peasants and the near landless.

Before December 2010, almost all observers who thought they knew the countries of the region and their various difficulties and problems were well aware of the risk of spontaneous or organised violent protest. There had been, for example, the bread riots in Tunisia in 1984 and protests in phosphate mines in the south of the country (Seddon 1986, 1, 14; Daoud 2011; Bachta 2011, 11). And there had been bread riots in Egypt in 1977 and among other demonstrations, working-class protests in the textiles towns north of Cairo from 2006 (Toth 1998, 76; Ireton 2013; Beinin 2011). Despite this, the events of late 2010 and early 2011 came as a surprise to almost everyone. This was because they were the culmination of long historical processes of struggles by the poor and disenfranchised that had often gone without notice. In Egypt the resistance of the peasants against the agrarian reform of 1992 led to their expropriation by landed interests of agrarian capitalism and the birth of movements of struggles for democracy, especially among the middle classes.

Introduction

One of the many slogans of Egyptian protesters against the Mubarak dictatorship in January 2011 was ‘Bread, freedom and social justice.’ This was similar to the slogans in Tunisia by protestors between December 2010 and January 2011. The presence of the word bread in the slogan marks similar origins and progression of the revolutionary processes in Tunisia and Egypt. In both cases, the issue of sustained access to affordable food was at the heart of the popular uprisings. It constituted the core of the claims of millions of demonstrators who, in a few weeks, were able to defeat two of the harshest dictatorships in the region that were thought to be untouchable and unshakable.

Focusing on the food issue as a central element of the revolutionary events in Tunisia and in Egypt emphasises three important aspects of the uprising. The first of these is the importance of a longue durée view of historical transformation. This contrasts with the naïve mainstream reading of the events that reduces the origins of the uprisings to issues of political rights and freedom and an objective of creating liberal democracy (Abdelrahman 2012; Mazeau and Sabaseviciute 2014). We have argued that the sociospatial chronology of the long processes of discontent in Tunisia and Egypt were propelled from the most marginalised regions, including rural areas and poor neighbourhoods. The demands were first and foremost social: access to food and natural resources including land and water, employment, housing, health infrastructure and services (Bush and Ayeb 2012; Ayeb 2011a; El Nour 2015b). Second, the food issue highlights how the peasantry in both countries was particularly active in the resistance and contestation that characterised the long revolutionary processes (Bush and Ayeb, 2014; Ayeb, 2017). Finally, despite the clear differences in term of landscapes and agricultural structures, exclusive irrigation in Egypt and mostly rainfed in Tunisia, the process of marginalisation and impoverishment of peasants in both countries was similar. It had been fuelled by years of agricultural and hydro-political neo-liberal policies that largely favoured big investors and which produced similar political consequences.

This chapter examines peasant, agricultural and food questions in Egypt. We reflect on the long mobilisation and role of the peasant in the revolutionary processes, which, in Egypt had begun well before 2010–11 and which continue in the contemporary period.

Introduction

This book has traced how the trade-based theory of food security is the dominant narrative and policy emphasis regarding food, agriculture and hunger in Egypt and Tunisia. We have documented some of the more insidious impacts of how the storyline of food security has panned out historically with reference to broader regional dynamics that include economic reform, war and environmental crisis. This concluding chapter examines whether an alternative food sovereignty (FS) framework is emerging in Egypt and Tunisia and if it is not, why does the food security paradigm continue to be hegemonic? We also ask even if FS is not a regular feature of food-related discourse in Egypt and Tunisia, have there been any recent dents in the emphasis on food security, and if so, with what kind of relative success for promoting a meaningful and sustainable alternative? We indicate that although farmer unrest and protest, over issues as broad as land boundaries, irrigation access, farming input provision, marketing and distribution of produce, may not use the language of FS, the struggles do in fact centre around many of the claims and agenda articulated by global food social movements and especially those championed by FS broadly defined and La Via Campesina (LVC).

Food Sovereignty

There is no single variant or definition of FS. Like democracy, FS is a process without an end but one that nevertheless as we will see, contains several important key themes that promote peasant and small farmer demands for autonomy and control over food production and consumption. In short, FS offers a comprehensive peasant path to social control and decision-making over food-related issues. Food sovereignty also begs the question of the relationship between the town and countryside, of the importance of maintaining delivery of food to urban areas at prices that are affordable and sustainable. Ultimately, FS offers an agenda for promoting a national sovereign project (Amin S. 2017a). We discussed this idea in Chapter 1 and return to it in this chapter. For the moment we need to understand that there is an agrarian question in the twenty-first century and it is one that contests the genocide of the imperialist triad and which promotes the dominant global food regime.

Introduction

This chapter examines the debate in Egypt and Tunisia about food security. It highlights that there is only a very limited and restricted debate, other than among small groups of activists and some academic activists. When these alternative voices are raised, they are often at the risk of personal safety in criticising government policy. Government media and policy ‘debate’ is regulated and constrained, where it exists at all. It is restricted to compliance with time weary IFI discourse regarding the importance of neo-liberal free markets and open international trade as vehicles for agricultural growth and prosperity. The common feature of all government pronouncements is the assumption that crops can grow without farmers, unless they are large-scale capital-intensive investors, often with little farming experience if they have farmed at all.

We broaden the debate about food security away from macro-economic concerns of trade in food on international markets and the ability of states to purchase food on global markets. We pursue our concern to place small-scale farmers at the centre of the action needed regarding food availability and consumption. We also affirm the importance of food security becoming an integral part of national (and regional?) strategies of rural development. For too long food security has been divorced from the development of links with the producers of food. The debate has remained focused on the interests of big capital, direct foreign investments and export crop production. We will indicate how food and agricultural policy has helped shape politics and underdevelopment in Egypt and Tunisia. We highlight how a rhetoric of exportdriven growth and the failure to engage by governments with food producers has repeatedly failed to safeguard national food availability at affordable prices for the poor and ensure well-being for small holder farmers.

Our discussion of food security further advances our critique of the contemporary world food regime. We begin to allude to the importance of an agenda of food sovereignty and how a strategy to promote that will necessarily have to understand the contradictions that emerge from the food regime and the ways in which food is produced in our two case studies. We detail the farming systems in Egypt and Tunisia in Chapters 5 and 6.

Introduction

Two processes have shaped Tunisia's food and agriculture sector. The first has been an increase in food dependence, which has become structural and exceeds 50 per cent of the country's food needs. The second has been the general impoverishment of the peasantry, which in large part is now unable to supply and ensure its own food security.

This combined situation of food dependence and peasant poverty is far from being a simple cyclical crisis and is instead the culmination of more than a century of anti-peasant government policies. These are the result of decision-makers during both the colonial era and since independence, to integrate Tunisian agriculture into the global market and the global food system (Friedmann 2005; Friedmann 2016; Friedmann and McMichael 1989). The reliance on the global food system and the global market results in high exposure to the risks of unstable international prices for agricultural and food products. This was highlighted during the 2007–8 global food crisis that hit the Tunisian economy dependent on imported cereals and vegetable oils. Cereals and vegetable oils account for 80 per cent of food energy availability, and imports constitute a significant part of the consumption: 75 per cent for the soft wheat, 20 per cent for the durum wheat and close to 100 per cent for the oils’ (Ben Said et al. 2011, 37–38).

Peasants and Agricultural Land: A Source of Inequality

Access to land for small-scale family farmers has worsened since independence. This is because the political decisions taken by state holders fostered the interests and enhanced access for big agricultural landowners.