Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Agrarian Transformations and Modernisations
- 2 War, Economic Reform and Environmental Crisis
- 3 The Agrarian Origins of Regime Change
- 4 Food Security in Egypt and Tunisia
- 5 Farmers and Farming: Tunisia
- 6 Farmers and Farming: Egypt
- 7 Food Sovereignty
- References
- Index
5 - Farmers and Farming: Tunisia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 October 2019
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Agrarian Transformations and Modernisations
- 2 War, Economic Reform and Environmental Crisis
- 3 The Agrarian Origins of Regime Change
- 4 Food Security in Egypt and Tunisia
- 5 Farmers and Farming: Tunisia
- 6 Farmers and Farming: Egypt
- 7 Food Sovereignty
- References
- Index
Summary
The peasantry has always been considered, in its vast majority as a force of inertia, blockage, as a brake on the modernization of agriculture. On it crystallize all the deficiencies, the weaknesses of the traditional society. The peasantry can truly be the subject of its own future only if it is radically transformed. For this she must be educated, guided, oriented, helped. What it is: its history, its culture, its social organization, its relationship to space, its know-how, is of no interest. Agriculture, as an economic sector, has always been enslaved (in the cybernetic sense of the term) to a logic of operation, to economic objectives that were external to it and derived from the development strategy implemented (Gachet, 1987, 149).
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.
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- Information
- Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North AfricaAgrarian Questions in Egypt and Tunisia, pp. 93 - 122Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2019