Introduction
In the spring of 2011, the people of Egypt blazed a trail towards a future different from the past, in a show of courage, discipline and determination that impressed an entire world. Tahrir Square was a defining moment. Inspiring people from Chile to Uganda, India to the United States, it appeared to inaugurate a new era of popular struggle (see e.g. Davis 2011, Mason 2012), and there can ultimately be only one explanation for this: the ailments of Mubarak's Egypt had something in common with the broader state of the world. Neoliberalism remains a neat shorthand for that state. Despite anxieties over its manifold meanings and sometimes sloppy usage, the term is indispensible for capturing the global trend of extending the institution of private property into all realms of human life, set in train in the early 1970s (Ferguson 2008, Brenner et al. 2010, Castree 2010a). Precisely that trend formed the immediate backdrop to the Egyptian revolution (see Joya 2011).
Human life, however – like neoliberalism – is nothing without biophysical resources. Neoliberalism, as Noel Castree has recently argued with force, is constituted through its engagement with the extra-human environment, and unthinkable outside of it (Castree 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2011). A hallmark of its advance throughout the world is the transformation of biophysical resources – be they land or water, plants or minerals – into commodities, to be owned privately, purchased and sold on ‘free’ markets. Parts of the natural world hitherto owned by nobody, by the state or the local community are enclosed and reserved for the disposal of private proprietors. This does not, however, mean that the state abdicates and vanishes from sight, as a popular misunderstanding of neoliberalism would have it. On the contrary, the state is often absolutely instrumental in establishing the rule of private property – particularly if resistance is encountered – and enforcing the rules of the market (Castree 2010a, pp. 20, 29, Brenner et al. 2010, p. 330, cf. e.g. Radice 2008, Wacquant 2012).
Such, indeed, was the mission pursued by the Egyptian state in the time of Hosni Mubarak. Having surrendered to the diktats of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the early 1990s, the regime embarked on increasingly aggressive campaigns for transferring the human and biophysical resources of Egypt – including labour, land and, as we shall see, the water of its lakes – to capital (see e.g. Mitchell 2002, Bush 2002, Farah 2009, El-Mahdi and Marfleet 2009, Kandil 2011, Joya 2011). This entailed a considerable exertion of violence. To expand the sway of private property, the state mustered its arms of physical force: the apparatus of the National Democratic Party, the police branches, the baltagiya – a generic term for plainclothes henchmen on the payroll of the regime – and their various mutations were sent to impose free-market solutions whenever required. Moreover, the entrepreneurs appropriating the resources freed up by the state were often indistinguishable from the representatives of that very state: corruption, murky affairs, illicit handovers of assets were not occasional temptations in the liaison between state and capital, but the very modus operandi. The Egyptian state under Mubarak offered a particularly stark synthesis of authoritarian state power and unbridled private property.
Now, if Egypt in 2011 placed itself at the forefront of global resistance against the onslaughts of neoliberalism, the country is also at the frontline of another phenomenon defining the present era. It is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. The Nile Delta figures frequently in research on sea level rise, as an extremely flat and dense home of population, agriculture, industry and cultural heritage on the verge of inundation (see e.g. Parry et al. 2007, Bohannon 2010, Dasgupta et al. 2011, El-Raey 2010, Tolba and Saab 2009). According to one survey of the impacts of sea level rise on the developing world, Egypt stands to lose more than any other country in terms of agricultural land should global sea levels rise by one metre. It ranks second in terms of population exposed, third in terms of share of GDP under threat, and fifth in terms of urban areas at risk. In the projections of this particular study, 25% of the Delta would be submerged by a one-metre sea level rise (Dasgupta et al. 2009a).
There is currently little reason to hope that these scenarios will be avoided. Rather than decreasing under the immense pressure of climate science, emissions of greenhouse gases are accelerating dramatically. In the 1990s, average annual growth of global CO2 emissions was 1%; in the first seven years of the new millennium it was 3.6% – well above a tripling of the rate – while in 2010 it reached the all-time high of 5.9% (Raupach et al. 2007, Canadell et al. 2007, Peters et al. 2012). The year of the Arab revolutions was accompanied by a projected growth of more than 3%: a new ‘business as usual’ (Peters et al. 2012). But this should perhaps come as no surprise. A second distinctive feature of the neoliberal engagement with biophysical resources is, according to Castree, ‘unprecedented levels of commodity production, transportation, consumption and disposal’ (Castree 2010c, p. 1744). Not only are resources turned into commodities: they are consumed and dissipated in larger quantities, over shorter timescales. For the Nile Delta, this might spell disaster.
The archetypal Delta inhabitant is a farmer, tilling the famously fertile soil with the lavish water of the Nile: both resources are at risk of disappearing. Far less attention has been paid to the fisherfolk of the Delta. Their predicament is no less precarious, and deserves study for its own sake. The fisherfolk of the northernmost Nile Delta inhabit some of the areas most exposed to sea level rise, but they also suffer the consequences of one of the Mubarak regime's most high-profile experiments in neoliberal development: the rise of the Egyptian aquaculture industry. One factor strikes them from the front, the other from the back. Thus their predicament offers a starting point for inquiring into a nexus largely overlooked by climate change research as well as revolutionary activists in Egypt and elsewhere: the relationship between neoliberalism and vulnerability to climate change.
In this article, we shall offer a brief introduction to the difficulties faced by fishing communities in the north-eastern Nile Delta, between the shores of Lake Borullus and the Mediterranean Sea and, to a lesser extent, between Lake Manzala and the sea. We draw upon fieldwork in the area in May and June 2011, as well as newspaper reports and previous research on sea level rise and aquaculture in Egypt. Towards the end, we try to outline a conceptual framework for understanding the pinch these communities find themselves in: trapped between the forces of neoliberalism and climate change, they are in a fight for their survival. One part of the threat emanates from the policies of the Mubarak regime, inviting the conclusion that the Egyptian revolution provides at least the opportunity for some kind of redemption. But that may be an overly optimistic prognosis. Even more Herculean efforts than those invested in the toppling of Mubarak might be required if the age-old lands and waters of the northern Delta fisherfolk are to be saved.
The overstrained kidneys of Egypt
While farming has been the predominant activity throughout the Nile Delta's history, a significant attractor of human settlers immediately after its formation some 6000–8000 years ago was the richness of the great coastal wetlands. Their teeming fish stocks have underpinned northern Delta civilisation ever since. Forming a string of shallow lagoons, ‘the four sisters’ run from Lake Mariut on the outskirts of Alexandria in the west, via Lake Idku to the large Lake Borullus and, largest of all, Lake Manzala to the east of Damietta. Historically, they constitute a quarter of all Mediterranean wetlands, delicately balancing inflowing seawater with freshwater from the Nile in highly biodiverse and productive ecosystems. Narrow marine bars separate the lagoons from the sea and support a string of communities, traditionally alternating between the fishing grounds of the lakes and the sea (Stanley and Warne 1993, Shaltout and Khalil 2005, Dumont and El-Shabrawy 2007, Agrawala et al. 2004).
With the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, nutrient-rich sediments were blocked from reaching the mouths of the Nile. Catches near the coast decreased, and the boats of the fishing communities turned inwards, to the four sisters. But the dam likewise obstructed the flow of nutrients into the lakes, a poor substitution for which was the rising tide of effluents from industry and intensified agriculture. Wetlands are sometimes described as the kidneys of landscapes, since they tend to receive wastewater, filter it and pass it on to the sea; in the case of Egypt, the kidneys have become severely overstrained.
The sewage, drainage water and soup of chemical substances from the Delta industries streaming unobstructed into the lakes have, particularly since the mid 1990s, tainted their waters, sped up eutrophication and, in general, turned the lagoons into sinks for pollutants (Bush and Sabri 2000, Shaltout and Khalil 2005, Hamza 2009, Dumont and El-Shabrawy 2007, Oczkowski and Nixon 2008, Chen et al. 2010). While a heavier load of nitrogen and phosphorous can in fact increase the yield of fish in the short term, beyond a threshold the stocks begin to collapse. This has already happened in the most polluted of the four lakes, Mariut, the all-but-destroyed kidney of Alexandria; the three others appear to be on their way to the same tipping point (Integrated Regional Information Networks [IRIN] 2008, Oczkowski and Nixon 2008). Indeed, in February 2010, Al-Ahram Weekly reported that production in Manzala had already begun to drop, primarily for one reason:
The lake is used as a dumping ground by nearby factories, and receives large quantities of agricultural run-off, including pesticides. ‘We have sent official complaints to the concerned authorities. All that happens is that officials come, make empty promises, and then leave’, says [Amir] Mansour [spokesperson for the Independent Association of Fishermen of Lake Manzala]. (Leila 2010)
The pollution and the eutrophication, together with urbanisation, road construction and ‘land reclamation’, contribute to a steady reduction of the surface area of the four sisters. Between the 1950s and the 1990s, Mariut lost 54% of its area, Idku 27%, Borullus 39%, and Manzala 49%; since then, the losses have accelerated, particularly for Mariut (Hamza 2009). Much like the rest of the Delta, the great lakes appear to have entered a phase of environmental destruction prior to the advent of tangible climate change (cf. Stanley and Warne 1998).
Nearly a third of the Nile Delta is either less than one metre above or below sea level. The four sisters are all located in the lowest-lying areas, where the flat land almost imperceptibly merges with the sea through the transitional ecosystems of the lagoons (see e.g. Stanley 1996, Stanley and Warne 1998). Since the Aswan dams terminated the northward transport of sediments, the Delta is sinking. The rates of subsidence vary between 1 and 9mm per year, with the highest figures registered in the east, around Lake Manzala (see e.g. Stanley 1990, Agrawala et al. 2004, El-Raey 2010).
Since the 1990s, global sea level rise has been accelerating rapidly, reaching a mean rate of 3.3mm per year between 1993 and 2009, with significant local variations. The melting of glaciers and sea ice is now the dominant driver of the process (see e.g. Nicholls and Cazenave 2010). In the Mediterranean, rates of sea level rise fluctuate widely from one year to another and between different parts of the sea; in the 1990s, annual rises of 1–3cm were registered in the Levantine sector, lapping the shores of the Nile Delta (Criado-Aldeanueva et al. 2008). That might very well be a harbinger of the future. It does not bode well for the communities north of Borullus and Manzala.
A town hanging by a thread
Lake Borullus is a typical specimen of the Nile Delta lagoon system. Some 40 to 200cm deep, it is the second largest of the four lakes, the only one to be a Ramsar site – protected, that is, under the 1971 Convention on Wetlands of International Importance – and the traditional basis for a vibrant community of fisherfolk (Shaltout and Khalil 2005, Dumont and El-Shabrawy 2007). Borullus provides the livelihood for some 50,000–60,000 artisanal fishermen, dependent on the open waters of the lake (IRIN 2009, Interview, Ghoneim).
The central fishing town in the area, Burg El-Borullus, straddles the marine bar separating the sea from the lake, right at the inlet where the two meet. The ground under Burg El-Borullus has already been chipped away by erosion, largely caused by the Aswan dams, and parts of the village have been surrendered to the sea. Accelerating sea level rise joins forces with the process (Fanos et al. 1995, El-Raey et al. 1999, El Banna 2004, Dumont and El-Shabrawy 2007). The marine bar along the lagoon, 500m at its narrowest, is shrinking perilously fast (Frihy et al. 2010). According to a projection from 2007, at the current speed ‘it would be a matter of a decade for sections of the northern shore of Borullus to collapse’, or, in other words, ‘it is only a matter of time before’ the life cycle of Lake Borullus ‘will be terminated by reintegration into the Mediterranean as a coastal bay’ (Dumont and El-Shabrawy 2007, pp. 681–682). A particularly severe storm in December 2010 caused a further surge of erosion on the north-eastern shore of the lake.
‘Hussein’ is a fisherman living in Burg El-Borullus. Sitting in his home in a densely packed neighbourhood, he describes a town hanging by a thread:
After the last storm there was a lot of water, some houses were inundated and some protection blocks overflown. We are afraid that Burg might disappear. There is not sufficient protection here. If you were driving from Alexandria to Burg El-Borullus maybe a decade ago, you wouldn't have seen the sea, but now you can see it everywhere: the water has risen… .
The village itself used to be full of sand mountains, we used to play on them when we were children. Some of them were 70–80 meters high and we climbed them and rolled down. Now the sea has taken them, the land has been eroded. Old Burg is now under water, the buildings are 500 meters out in the sea. When we go fishing and the water is clear we can see the walls of the buildings… .
We fishermen can feel that the sea level is rising, and so people here have begun building their houses higher. But if you, for example, build a stair with seven or eight steps above the sea level, after many years you cannot find those steps.
The Egyptian trends of longer and more intense storms, with the December 2010 event the most spectacular so far, mirror global developments (Dasgupta et al. 2011). Even a small sea level rise would ‘significantly magnify the impact of storm surges’ (Dasgupta et al. 2009a, p. 381). A sea level rise of one metre is, according to one study, expected to intensify storms across developing countries and increase the share of their total coastal territory exposed to surges, from today's 7.82% to 13.36%, doubling the population at risk (Dasgupta et al. 2011). The region singled out for the greatest increase in population exposed to once-in-a-hundred-year storm events under a one-metre sea level rise is the Middle East and North Africa. In that region, Egypt comes out on top: the country's ‘surge zone’ would expand by 83.6% under a one-metre scenario (Dasgupta et al. 2009b).
A fisherman in his sixties, ‘Suleiman’ remembers when he used to walk on land in Burg El-Borullus that is now totally submerged. These days, he claims, storms become ever more intrusive, reaching into houses at night. Protection systems are wholly lacking or deficient, while erosion and the removal of sand dunes for construction purposes invite the seawater further inland. For Suleiman and other fishermen in Burg El-Borullus, however, there is another, at least as pressing problem coming from the other side of the town. The lake is being enclosed by fish farms.
A lake off-limits
Aquaculture is the farming of fish in closed net-pens. Egypt is the cradle of the practice: tomb friezes dating back to 2500 BC record harvests of tilapia from ponds on the Nile (Sapkota et al. 2008). On the fours sisters, however, the predominant traditional practice has been fishing on the open lagoons, commons to which all fisherfolk have had inherited rights under a customary management system. Run with small boats or rafts, navigated with poles in the shallow waters, that system has sustained the fishing communities around the lakes for millennia (Bush and Sabri 2000, Zwirn 2002, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations [FAO] 2011).
The Nasser regime built its first commercial fish farm in 1961, and over the coming decades, a very slow growth took place under the auspices of the state. It was not until the late 1990s that the take-off in Egyptian fish farming occurred. Spurred on by the World Bank, which established large-scale model farms and provided credit for the proliferation of hundreds of replicas, and the United States Agency for International Development, which recommended fish farming for feeding the poor, the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation launched a concerted campaign for the expansion of the industry (World Bank 2000, Bush and Sabri 2000, Zwirn 2002, FAO 2011, World Food Programme [WFP] 2011). The drive went hand in hand with the repeal of Nasser's land reform and the complete re-institution of private property on Egypt's farms. For the first time since the 1950s, tenants could be evicted, rents were regulated by the market, and landowners regained full rights to amass large holdings (see Bush 2002). One purpose of that counter-reform was to stimulate agribusiness in Egypt, and the same objective drove the expansion of aquaculture.
Traditionally, aquaculture in Egypt and elsewhere has been practised for subsistence needs, in small farms, with low stock density and minimal extra inputs. Industrial aquaculture is of another character entirely. To maximise profit, thousands of fish must be raised on the feedlots, with all sorts of inputs to ratchet up productivity (Brummet and Williams 2000, Clausen and Clark 2005, Sapkota et al. 2008). In the twenty-first century, this is the engine of a virtual explosion of global growth: industrial aquaculture is now considered the fastest growing sector of agriculture and animal food production in the world, and the expansion is only expected to continue (Clausen and Clark 2005, Sapkota et al. 2008).
One critical factor behind this trend is, of course, the depletion of fish stocks in the world's oceans. For actors such as the World Bank and FAO, aquaculture now promises a ‘blue revolution’ in analogy with the green one, offering a way out of the fish crisis as well as a basis for food security in the developing world (Clausen and Clark 2005). Egypt is the African spearhead. Accounting for four out of every five fish farmed on the continent and 65% of all fish consumed in Egypt, almost quadrupling output between 1999 and 2011, the aquaculture sector is perceived to be a model (Brummet and Williams 2000, Zwirn 2002, McGrath 2009, 2010, Viney 2011, FAO 2011). The bright lessons from Egypt are to be exported to other African nations groping for food security. Indeed, the Mubarak regime itself sought to improve the strained relations with one of its key African neighbours, Ethiopia, by exporting aquaculture know-how and establishing cooperation between the two countries' private fish sectors (see e.g. Salem 2010).
One of the most enthusiastic champions of Egyptian aquaculture is the FAO. Estimating that ‘over 99 percent’ of output comes from ‘privately owned farms’, it goes on to state that the industry has expanded ‘as a result of the high returns on investment’ – profit, in other words – and is now undergoing a complete overhaul:
Aquaculture is developing rapidly from a traditional family-run business into a modern industry. As a result, the number of traditional family farms is declining and replaced by semi-intensive and intensive farming operations…. The high rate of return on investment in aquaculture has attracted a large number of small to middle level investors who tend to have a more scientific background than the traditional farmers (FAO 2011),
The vast majority of fish farms are ‘clustered in the areas surrounding’ the four sisters in the Delta (FAO 2011). In Borullus, they enclose their pens with dykes of mud and reed, occupying more and more of the lake's area (Shaltout and Khalil 2005, Frihy et al. 2010). Magda Ghoneim, a lecturer in rural sociology at Ain-Shams University, Cairo, has been working together with fishermen's associations in the Borullus region. She offers this assessment:
You have people in the lake who say ‘this land is mine’, without having contracts, and the big families, the powerful fishermen say ‘this area is for my family’ and use reeds to surround their areas and expand them more and more. And then the free area of the lake dramatically decreased …. 130 farms on the southern section of the lake have legal contracts for 3000 feddan, but now they actually have 18,000 feddan, and they continue to expand, spreading the reeds to hide their illegal business. They produce three times more fish than all the small fishermen in Lake Borullus together. What they do is very harmful for the whole lake, but they don't care. They throw the waste from their farms into the lake, and this is of course forbidden. They are using small fish as fodder in their farms, and it is a big business: people go and get small fishes, dry them in the sun and then make powder from them to use as fodder. It is more profitable than heroin.
These are major businesses, but the big problem is all the corruption behind them. You could not get a fish farm without contacts in the police and in the NDP [the National Democratic Party of the Mubarak regime, now dissolved]. It is so unfair. (Interview, Magda Ghoneim)
There is poverty here because of what happened with the lake, the baltagiya are taking over it. For 20 years they have been bribing policemen and shore guards to allow them to make their own fish farms. They take the small fish from the lake, and the water coming out from the farms is bad, full of hormones…. If we don't demolish those farms, then our fishermen won't be able to live, because they won't find a place to fish.
Nothing destroyed the lake more than the fish farms. They totally destroyed especially the small fish…. The owners are big tycoons and nobody could prevent them from doing anything. Big names in the country supported them, and the police was corrupt when they began their business.
The fisherfolk of Burg El-Borullus are being squeezed between a rising sea and an enclosed lake. Both threaten the material bases of their livelihoods, in different but inevitably connected ways.
‘We would become like refugees’
The pinch is even tighter a stone's throw to the west of Burg El-Borullus, in the hamlet of Bar El-Bahri, on a section of the marine bar that almost has the appearance of a sandy surfboard placed between the sea and the lagoon. During the storm of December 2010, high waves from both directions converged on the hamlet and put it under water. ‘Naguib’, a fisherman entirely dependent on catches from the lake, lives in Bar El-Bahri with his family. He describes their situation thus:
We are affected by the weather, but we are also affected by the fish farms…. The sea is rising. There is no protection along the coast here, we need it urgently. Since three or four years the storms have become stronger, and in the winter the foundations of the buildings are weakened by the water. During the storm last year, many had to leave their houses in the middle of the night – our house is a little higher than the others, so we let our neighbours stay here. For 20 days the water covered Bar El-Bahri. We were very badly affected, there was no electricity, the only things that made us survive were the food we had stored and the help we gave each other….
There used to be sand dunes giving good protection and stopping the waves, but now the waves reach all the way here. We must have protection on the shores, both on the sea and on the lake – we are completely surrounded by water. The protection should be three and a half meters high at the sea and one and a half at the lake to stop the waves.
Our catches are diminishing and some fish species are now extinct. It's because of the bad administration of the lake, all the fish farms built without restrictions. Those who established farms were members of the NDP and had contacts in the government and money to bribe the police. And now the character of the water is altered and the fish stocks have shrunk.
Guarded by armed men and dogs, fish farms have sealed off ever larger parts of Lake Manzala from boats (Bush and Sabri 2000). In 2003, Mohamed Bayoumi, an expert on the Delta working with the United Nations Development Programme, told Al-Ahram Weekly:
The owners of the fish farms in this area are squatters on state-owned land and do not have titles for the lands, although they are selling it to each other. You might also have been informed that the fish farming business in this area is run by people who are not living in this area or even in this governorate and are backed by influential people who never appear in the picture but share in the incredible profits of the business. Moreover, the fish farms in this area are fed from the drain and are unfortunately producing polluted fish, a business that should be halted. (Quoted in Farag 2003)
We can see that the climate is changing. The seasons have shifted and the fishermen no longer know when to fish or not. This year the winter was not cold, and now that we are in May it should be warmer. This affects the fish stocks and the composition of species… . Formerly, the fishermen knew there would be four to five storms every year and did not venture out on the seas during storm season. Now no one knows when a storm will hit, and some fishermen have drowned… .
Fishermen are intelligent, they travel to Greece and other places and see the changes clearly, so they build their houses higher to protect them from being submerged. But I fear for the survival of Izbet El-Burg. If someone asks me for advice on whether to build a house here or not, I advise him not to, for we will probably drown. We have water on three sides. I can see it coming.
Catching fish in the net of private property
The fishing communities north of the twin sisters Borullus and Manzala are clearly in dire straits. Their many woes begin with the progressive degradation of the lagoon environments. The source of pollution eliciting the most intense complaints from the fisherfolk, however, is aquaculture: fitting a global pattern, the Egyptian industry can expand only by adding more artificial inputs into its farms. Penned up in cages, under conditions of poor hygiene and stress, aquacultural fish must be fed with antibiotics to prevent bacterial infections. As a result, antibiotic resistance and residues threaten the health of fish and people in the vicinity (Clausen and Clark 2005, Sapkota et al. 2008). Together with North Korea, Egypt is the only country in the world without statistics on antibiotics use in its aquaculture industry – hardly a proof of absence (Sapkota et al. 2008). Moreover, 90% of the water used to fuel Egypt's farms is recycled from agricultural drainage, containing chemicals and organic matter detrimental to fish – high heavy-metal concentrations have been detected in the farms – which necessitate, in turn, ever more antibiotics to keep yields up (Viney 2011, Chen et al. 2010).
Hormones are employed to bolster the growth of the fish, in Egypt and elsewhere. Waste products are used as fodder – mostly from poultry, in Egypt's case – and the substances that are put into the ponds are bound to leak into the surrounding waters. In Borullus and Manzala, moreover, the ponds curtail water circulation, worsen oxygen deficiency and let off impoverished water into adjacent farmlands (El Banna and Frihy 2009, Elewa and El Nahry 2009, Oczkowski and Nixon 2008, IRIN 2009). Needless to say, intensification by means of artificial inputs becomes increasingly necessary as the degradation of the natural environment of the lakes proceeds unchecked. The spiral is vicious indeed.
The Egyptian aquaculture boom has been touted as a marvel of economic growth and food security alike, one of the Mubarak regimes's greatest developmental successes. Amongst other feats, it is said to have created employment opportunities, boosted exports, offered cheap protein to the poor and doubled per-capita fish consumption between 1995 and 2009 (Zwirn 2002, McGrath 2009, FAO 2011). But the supposed blessing is not unmixed, even for consumers. In 2010, a nationwide fish scare broke out, following reports that fish farmed in Lake Manzala was dangerously contaminated (Leila 2010). However, the most direct impacts fall on the artisanal fisherfolk communities. The farms displace them from their traditional fishing grounds, first by enclosing the lakes, and then by further poisoning what remains of the open water.
Meanwhile, from the northern side of the marine bars, a rising sea encroaches on the very same communities. How are we to conceptualise this squeeze? Aquaculture in Borullus and Manzala is, to begin with, a perfect fit for David Harvey's concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003, cf. e.g. Glassman 2006, Bonefeld 2011). Providing analytical depth to the hallmark processes of neoliberalism studied by Castree and others, the concept has, of course, been immensely influential. In outlining it, Harvey lists some basic elements, starting with the ‘commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations’ – exactly what took place in Egypt's countryside in the 1990s. Second, there is ‘the conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights’, and third, ‘the suppression of rights to the commons’ (Harvey 2003, p. 145).
The closest Harvey comes to a formal definition of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ is this: ‘What accumulation by dispossession does is to release a set of assets (including labour power) at very low (and in some instances zero) cost.’ Capital can then ‘seize hold of such assets and immediately turn them to profitable use’ (Harvey 2003, p. 149). Resources that have hitherto been lying fallow and dormant from the viewpoint of capital – they might have been used by people for subsistence needs, but that is immaterial – are appropriated and thrown into circulation. Only then can they breathe ‘new life into capital accumulation’ (Harvey 2003, p. 151).
Fish is a resource with a natural tendency to elude private property: moving freely in water, unlike plants and cattle behind fences, it ignores demarcations of ownership (Sneddon 2007). ‘The sea's lack of natural boundaries’, wrote Edward Carr in a remarkable article in The Economist in 1998, frustrates ‘the task of designing institutions to manage the marine environment’. Only a drastic solution can open this element to private property:
To enhance its uses, the water must become ever more like the land, with owners, laws and limits. Fishermen must behave more like ranchers than hunters… . Mankind may have to treat the coastal waters like prime agricultural land. (Carr 1998, p. 4)
As in so many other forms of accumulation by dispossession – including the eviction of Egypt's tenant farmers in the late 1990s – the task of executing active dispossession fell on the state. Through its extrajudicial police forces, its networks of baltagiya, its venal webs of businessmen and NDP bureaucrats, the Egyptian state erected or protected the barriers of private property inside the lagoons, whose shallow waters were amenable to the purpose (cf. Sneddon 2007, El-Mahdi and Marfleet 2009, Farah 2009). Large capital continues to be attracted to the farms (cf. IRIN 2009).
Aquaculture lends itself to analysis with several concepts from the armoury of critical political economy. It might be said to represent a form of real subsumption of nature, in which capital assumes control of the entire life cycle of organisms, regulating and manipulating their reproduction for maximum profit (Boyd et al. 2001). Or, when the world's oceans descend ever deeper into a metabolic rift, tearing apart the flows of nutrients and fish and depleting biomass, that rift is transferred to fish farms, where it merely expands in new forms (Clausen and Clark 2005, Foster, Clark and York 2010). Or, aquaculture is yet another instance of a spatial fix, by which capital displaces its contradictions into pristine territories (Harvey 1999). Here, we shall stick with the concept of accumulation by dispossession, for it better reflects some essential aspects of the opposite side of the squeeze.
In the nutcracker of capital
Climate change is a form of dispossession. As its various effects hit communities, it deprives them of resources, be they the land submerged, houses damaged or flushed away, seasonal cycles ripped apart, fruit trees or vegetables catching unfamiliar diseases, species of fish or game dislodged from their habitats, or rivers drying up. At its root, climate change is the fallout from two centuries of fossil-fuel-based capital accumulation, or ‘business as usual’. People such as the fisherfolk of the northern Nile Delta were never party to the creation of that business. The accumulation of capital wedded to the combustion of fossil fuels was decidedly not of their making (see Malm 2012a).
From 1750 to 2005, about 0.2% of total cumulative emissions of greenhouse gases in the world – including from land-use change – can be attributed to Egypt. By comparison, the United States accounts for 20–25% (Höhne et al. 2011). In 2008, an average American emitted seven times more CO2 from fossil fuel combustion than an average Egyptian – and that is an average Egyptian, not an artisanal fisher in the northern Nile Delta (and the figure is based on national production, not consumption statistics) (Boden et al. 2011, cf. Roberts and Parks 2007). In the dry words of an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report, ‘the contribution of Egypt to the overall emissions of greenhouse gases is considered minute compared to the high potential impacts on all sectors’ (Agrawala et al. 2004, p. 19). In the more animated words of ‘Mohammed’, the fishermen's leader in Izbet El-Burg:
The advanced countries are responsible for everything happening here. Technology is a double-edged sword, it might have facilitated some scientific advances but it has also affected poor places and countries. Perhaps it wasn't the intention, but we are truly suffering from it.
The two forms of dispossession reinforce one another. At the very moment when the oceans become more unpredictable, the enclosure of the lakes pushes the traditional fisherfolk towards the sea. Had the lagoons been left unpolluted and unappropriated, the communities would clearly have been better off, endowed with greater buffers of resources to cope with the adverse impacts of climate change; now those buffers are centralised in the hands of capital. Vulnerability to climate change has been produced by the neoliberal policies of the Mubarak regime – and the former exacerbates the consequences of the latter. We are dealing with a brutal feedback loop.
If industrial aquaculture in the northern Nile Delta is a case of accumulation by dispossession, climate change arrives in the area as dispossession by or from accumulation. If the former appropriates resources to accumulate capital, the other destroys resources as a result of having already done so. The processes have different temporalities and spatialities – one is local and immediate, the other global and backloaded; one unites cause and effect, the other has them widely dispersed – but their root cause, we contend, is the same.
As it has evolved in actual history, accumulation of capital presupposes private property and fossil fuels (see e.g. Malm 2012a, Clark and York 2005, Huber 2009). Moreover, since 1973, the year in which the neoliberal era was born according to David Harvey as well as general consensus, capital has unleashed a relentless march of accumulation by dispossession across the globe in lockstep with the most extreme acceleration of fossil fuel combustion the world has ever witnessed (see e.g. Friedlingstein and Solomon 2005, Canadell et al. 2007). When ‘business as usual’ broke existing records after 2000, and again in 2010, the fishing communities of the northern Delta were still not a party to it: on the contrary, their impoverishment due to the encroachment of the fish farms proceeded in tandem with the global bonfire of fossil fuels. Both produced misery – current and future.
This is not the place to undertake a closer examination of the historical interlacement of the extension of private property and the consumption of fossil fuels, only to specify the predicament of the fishing communities of Borullus and Manzala. Accumulation of capital has created a nutcracker squeezing them from two sides, the one form of resource loss being related to the other as in a social teleconnection. The two types of neoliberal engagement with biophysical resources – privatisation and dissipation – have descended upon them, from different directions and consignors, as a double whammy. In other words, the communities are doubly dispossessed by accumulation.
Our case study is utterly local, providing little basis for generalisation. It visually illustrates the logic – the sea on the one side, the lake on the other – but that logic may very well be found in other places, in Egypt, in Africa, and in other peripheries of the world system. Accumulation by dispossession, a core process of neoliberal development, withdraws resources from communities at the very same time as climate change threatens to do so. Inferring from our case, we may hypothesise that the former tends to produce vulnerability to the latter. In so far as accumulation by dispossession pushes people towards the margins of their resource bases, and in so far as these same bases are endangered by the impacts of climate change, the two processes link up in time and space and catch communities from two sides. Further research should be able to identify more such cases.
The revolution: openings and limits
The Egyptian revolution, it follows, offers an opportunity to redress some of the grievances of the fishing communities of Borullus and Manzala. With the Mubarak regime swept away, there is at least a unique potential to reverse the demise of the northern Delta lagoons, first of all by undertaking some urgently needed protection and rehabilitation measures. Up to now, pleas for cleaning up the lakes, redirecting and treating waste and, perhaps most importantly, implementing integrated plans for development in the Delta have fallen on the deaf ears of a detached state. The destruction of the region has thrived on corruption and institutional chaos (cf. Zetter and Hassan 2002). Were a truly democratic Egypt to emerge, with accountable and decently managed institutions, officials should no longer be able to ‘come, make empty promises, and then leave’. They would have to do something for the people of the lakes. What policies the country's likely new Islamist rulers will in fact implement remains, of course, to be seen.
Furthermore, if post-Mubarak Egypt were to truly break out of neoliberalism and embark on a different path of development, the aquaculture industry should not be allowed to maintain its grip on the lagoons. Radical intervention against the festering farms is exigent – the very opposite of what international donors and financial institutions have been advocating. Egypt's aquaculture should clearly not be seen as a paragon of development for African nations struggling to attain food security. While ‘the blue revolution’ may, much like its green predecessor, generate yield spikes over the short term, it does not provide a sustainable source of protein. The intensification of fish farming seems bound to let loose novel chemical and biological agents in the food and general environment of poor people (Clausen and Clark 2005, Sapkota et al. 2008, Brummet and Williams 2000).
Moreover, the Egyptian case suggests that industrial aquaculture disrupts subsistence fishing communities, and to the extent that it is established in coastal areas, it will likely impinge on the very same resource bases that are under threat from climate change. By their definition, coastal communities are on the frontline of sea level rise; aquaculture in their area risks increasing vulnerability further. Post-Mubarak Egypt should not necessarily eradicate aquaculture: smallholder farms might deserve support. But a minimum first step should be to clear away the farms built illegally in Borullus and Manzala. No baltagiye should, it is to be hoped, stand in the way this time.
The key to any such change lies, of course, in the self-organisation of fisherfolk. In the rush to form independent trade unions after the fall of Mubarak, fishermen were among the most avid novices: in April 2011, a first Independent Union of Fishermen was formed. One activist, Kamal Hassan, explained to Al-Masry Al-Youm:
We've never had a union for fishermen before, so we are trying to raise awareness regarding the role of trade unions in protecting the rights of their members. Most fishermen aren't aware that unions serve to safeguard their constituents' interests, and to improve their working conditions. We expect that many more will join us when they see the benefits of unionization. (Charbel 2011)
The Workers Party supports the struggle of poor Egyptian fishermen against the leviathans of capital controlling their lakes and against these leviathans' destruction of the abundance of fish. The party struggles with the fishermen to set up independent associations for each fishing region and an independent general Egyptian fishermen's union. (Democratic Workers Party 2011)
CORI's hyper-optimism could be challenged on several grounds. What is interesting in this context, however, is that even these most sanguine scenarios for the future of the Delta count on the disappearance of the fishing communities of Borullus and Manzala. Among the 3% of the Delta that will be submerged under the sea in CORI's rosy worst-case projection is the part of the Borullus marine bar on which Burg is located, as well as large sections of the barrier between Manzala and the sea (Interview, El-Shinnawy). As for Manzala, CORI researchers expect the ‘the loss of the entire lagoon area’ under a one-metre sea level rise, giving Egypt a new northern shoreline where the sea will lap the heart of the Delta (Frihy et al. 2010, p. 271). As for Burg El-Borullus, CORI seems to have given up on the town, again in spite of its general and very explicit optimism:
Erosion is affecting built structures in some places – yes. There are villages like Burg El-Borullus, but the problem there is not the sea itself: it is the wrong place to put a village! There should be a buffering zone. There has been a planning mistake. (Interview, CORI researcher Muhammed Borhan)
The upshot of CORI's scenarios seems to be that the fisherfolk will eventually have to pack up and move. Their crucial assumption, however, is continued ‘business as usual’ – something no revolution inside Egypt can change. What about a revolution on a global scale? Could it be summoned to vanquish the forces of fossil capital? Were anything of the kind to succeed, would it be able to slow down sea level rise before it is too late?
These are, to say the least, daunting questions that must be dealt with elsewhere. Here, we shall merely conclude that whereas the Egyptian revolution offers an opportunity for reversing accumulation by dispossession in the northern Nile Delta, it has no tools for – and, it seems, no thoughts about – confronting the other flank of the pincer movement. The sources of climate change are located beyond the borders of Egypt, and beyond the limits of its political discourse. Even an ideal outcome of the revolutionary process, leading to dramatically reduced pollution in the Delta, clean and open lakes, and the best available seawall structures along the coastline, would leave the communities north of Borullus and Manzala exposed to the forces of ‘business as usual’. They are hardly alone in that predicament.
Notes on contributors
Andreas Malm is a PhD student in human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. His research focuses on the political economy of fossil fuel combustion; the topic of his dissertation is the transition to steam power in the cotton industry and imperial navy of early nineteenth-century Britain.
Shora Esmailian is a freelance journalist and writer based in Stockholm, Sweden. She edits Re:public, a magazine of documentary photography and reportage, and will shortly publish a book in Swedish on climate change and migration, based on extensive fieldwork in Kenya, Pakistan and Egypt.