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.