Egypt AGRICULTURE
Traditional pottery making near a site visited by tourists
Courtesy Susan Becker
Farming in Egypt was confined to less than 3 percent of the
total land area, because the country falls within arid and hyperarid zones. About 90 percent of the agricultural area was
concentrated in the Delta, and the rest fell within a narrow ribbon
along the Nile between Aswan and Cairo (Upper Egypt) and a strip
along the Mediterranean. The arable land was estimated by the
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization as being about
6.02 million feddans (1 feddan = 1.038 acres = .42
hectare) in 1987. This was the equivalent of about 0.12
feddan per capita, one of the lowest in the world, and less
than Bangladesh's 0.19. The warm weather, plentiful water, and
exceptionally fertile soil, however, enabled Egyptian farmers to
practice double and multiple cropping, which effectively doubled
the arable area (see
table 7, Appendix). Nevertheless, the relative
scarcity of arable land, coupled with, among other things, high
population growth, made Egypt depend on external sources for about
half of its food supply in the late 1980s.
In spite of Egypt's dependence on foreign food supplies and
agriculture's generally poor performance over the 1980s,
agriculture remained the key sector of the Egyptian economy and its
future development. In 1988 it contributed more than 20 percent of
GDP and about 9 percent of exports and employed more than 4 million
workers, or about one-third of total employment. Its significance
would be even more pronounced if account were taken of the
industries from which it purchased, such as fertilizers and
machinery, and those to which it sold, such as food processing and
textiles.
Agricultural development responded to the ecology, state
policy, technology, and shifts in the international political
economy. In the early nineteenth century under Muhammad Ali, Egypt
introduced long-staple cotton, which in 1990 remained a prized
commodity on the world market, and initiated the long-term process
of upgrading the irrigation system. The ecological conditions of
the Nile Valley proved eminently suitable for cotton cultivation.
Helped by a world cotton shortage arising from the American Civil
War in the 1860s, Egyptian agriculture expanded rapidly. By the
early 1900s, the situation had changed: additions to new arable
land were slow and increasingly costly as the quality of land to be
added became poorer, expansion of irrigation was not coupled with
expanded drainage, and the intensive cultivation of cotton
exhausted the soil and reduced its fertility. During the first half
of the twentieth century, agricultural growth may have averaged
less than 1 percent a year.
In addition to agriculture's declining growth rate, a social
crisis ensued in the countryside, manifested in great inequalities
and sporadic peasant rebellions. Reforming the conditions of
agriculture fell after 1952 to the Free Officers. The new regime
sought to carry out the task through extensive intervention in the
sector to the point where the state was described as the silent
partner; examination of state policy vis-à-vis agriculture is,
therefore, a prerequisite for understanding the evolution of the
sector. The state implemented land-reform programs, extended and
altered the irrigation system, reclaimed new land, and regulated
input and output prices as well as land use. Carrying out
agricultural controls was entrusted to the rural cooperatives. The
controls continued and were modified under Sadat and were gradually
being relaxed under Mubarak. The results of state intervention were
often mixed, both economically and socially.
Data as of December 1990
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