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.