Introduction
The effects of Egypt’s move towards economic liberalisation of the agricultural sector since the 1970s are well documented (Ayeb 2012; Bush 2000, 2002; Keshk 1996; Saad 1999, 2004). Liberalisation of the sector led to the enactment of laws which promoted large-scale land ownership and the withdrawal of the state from its many roles in the agricultural sector. The state withdrew from the supply of farming inputs (i.e. seeds, pesticides and fertilisers) and it stopped being the sole legal purchaser of many crops. Many agriculture-related services, such as the credit system, the fertiliser sector, marketing operations and the irrigation system, were privatised. Most importantly, the land sector was liberalised through a land law reform. In 1992, Law no. 96 was introduced, dramatically changing the legal status of land-holdings, which subjected land to market rules of supply and demand, leading to the eviction of about one million farmers and their families (Ayeb 2012; Bush 2000; Saad 1999). Consequently, agricultural liberalisation impoverished landless and small-scale farmers who constitute more than half (57.36%) of the Egyptian population.
To justify the evictions, an anti-socialist state-controlled media campaign generated images of landlords as ‘needy’, yet middle-class helpless citizens, oppressed by merciless tyrants, contrasting this image with a representation of peasants as lazy people who waste their time watching videos and abandoning the land, just to travel abroad and engage in empty consumerism (Saad 1999, 391–392). Tenants were thus portrayed as ‘unproductive’ and their lands as ‘underutilised’. Hence, similar to other contexts (Li 2007 on Indonesia and Idrus 2010 on Malaysia), farmers’ ‘failure’ to meet the country’s development goals was used instrumentally to dispossess them.
This national narrative was present in the governorate where I conducted my fieldwork – the governorate of Fayyūm. Here UN development experts argued that ‘inadequate’ land use was a consequence of small land-holdings, substantiating their claim on the basis that the majority (83.1%) of land-holdings were small (less than three feddans/1.26 ha) and that such land-holdings only covered one-third of the total cultivated area (UNDP 2003). Such narrative was ultimately used to justify the rise of large-scale capital-intensive investments at the expense of smallholder farming (Ayeb and Bush 2019, 78).
Agricultural liberalisation in Egypt resembles that which occurred in many post-socialist countries, in that ‘this ideological emphasis on rights dominated the privatization process in the former socialist bloc (and often elsewhere) and thus “it tended to mask their darker face”’ (Verdery 2003, 139). For instance, in post-socialist Russia, the Putin regime witnessed a ‘recovery’ in the agriculture sector. That translated into an increased interest in large-scale farming among domestic investors or a coalition of foreign and domestic investors, which expelled local communities with little or no compensation, a process that Visser, Mamonova, and Spoor (2012) conceptualise as domestic land-grabbing.
Domestic land-grabbing is normatively defined as ‘the process of land expropriation and displacement put in place by governments within their country borders to supposedly enhance development’ (Siciliano 2014, 333). Several parallel features are found between the Egyptian case and that of Russia. In both contexts lands were grabbed through legal, semi-legal and illegal deals, with domestic investors or national oligarchs. In the Egyptian context, Law 96 of the year 1992 not only legalised the evictions of one million farmers and their families but was also used as ‘a vehicle for misleading farmers and colluding with security forces to dispossess the legitimate farmers of it’ (LCHR 2002, 126). As argued by Bush (2000, 239), the implementation of this law also ‘opened a Pandora’s box of claims and counterclaims relating to ownership and control of many types of landholding’, including lands that were not subject to the law. Second, and more importantly, landed aristocrats who got the land back became key players in the agri-business and agro-export market, a small but significant corporate agri-food business making Egypt ‘a niche in supplying markets in the production of high value, low nutrition foodstuffs especially for Europe – strawberries, fine green beans, peppers and tomatoes, as well as grapes, peaches and other citrus crops’ (Bush 2000, 237).
This move was manifested in Egypt’s signing several free-trade bilateral agreements with the European Union such as the Barcelona Declaration, which aims, among other things, to modernise and restructure agriculture, to diversify production, to reduce food dependency and to promote environment-friendly agriculture (Bchir et al. 2011). This era witnessed an acceleration of privatisation when the government of Ahmad Nazif took office (2004–2011). Former prime minister Nazif appointed a large number of businessmen in his cabinet, sold off 80% of state-owned public enterprises and paved the way for foreign investors to initiate business through offering tax breaks and creating free zones (Gamal 2019, 2; Joya 2011, 371). An irony of these agreements, however, is that they included a cosmetic article on the empowerment of local communities, despite the fact that only large-scale producers can afford to compete in EU markets and even those, as Bchir et al. (2011) have demonstrated, are at a competitive disadvantage in terms of their access to European markets compared to other regions.
The transfer of land ownership in Egypt’s countryside from small farmers to erstwhile landowners is thus a textbook example of how the process of capital accumulation here was enabled by the dispossession of tenants on a large scale, a process that was key to the development of the capitalist agriculture sector in Egypt (Bush 2000; see also El Nour Forthcoming). Domestic land-grabbing is situated within a long process of land dispossession, in which the state and its oligarch drive land concentration on the basis of historical class dynamics. In Egypt, this type of land grab has preceded the wave of the post-2007/08 land grabs, similarly to what happened in other post-socialist countries (Greco 2015).
While these class struggles provoked discussions on the consequences of the reforms, the literature focuses on the negative consequences for tenants, with little attention to the ways in which landlords made use of the reappropriated lands. Drawing on fieldwork conducted from 2011 until 2013 in five Egyptian villages, the article addresses this lacuna by presenting research on a 500-feddan (210-hectare) private grape farm in the Qarūn region of Fayyūm governorate. The farm was established on lands owned by 245 tenants prior to the implementation of Law 92 of the year 1996. The case is interpreted as a domestic land grab, as the farm was established on parcels of land from which landless tenants were forcefully expelled in the aftermath of the implementation of the Law. It shares other features commonly associated with recent land grabs. The first is that it involved a conversion in land use from subsistence crops for domestic consumption to cash crops for export. The second is that the land grab was coupled with a substantial water grab via the appropriation of a large-scale irrigation infrastructure that relied on drip irrigation, thus leaving other lands without water (Barnes 2016, 22). The third is that the land grab was led by the same key players of the global land-grabbing processes, namely financial capitalists and members of the national dominant classes such as Egyptian national figures, relatives of ministers, business people, traders and exporters (Dixon 2014).
The main owner of the farm is Omar Abu Gabal, the nephew of Youssef Wālī, alongside other six co-owners from the same family. It is important to note that Youssef Wālī is a landed aristocrat who had also served as Minister of Agriculture and Land Reclamation (1982–2004) and as Secretary General of the now-dissolved National Democratic Party (NDP) (1984–2002) whose deputy secretary-general was Gamal Mubarak, the youngest son of the former president Hosni Mubarak. The village residents’ narratives about Youssef Wālī match what several scholars (for example, Joya 2011) have termed ‘crony capitalism’, referring to an alliance of money and political power. My interlocutors’ perception of their district as ‘izbet Youssef Wālī’, which translates as ‘the private estate of Youssef Wālī’, resonates with Salwa Ismail’s depiction of Egypt as a private estate governed by a thousand powerful families (Ismail 2011). In popular Arabic, the word ‘izba, which originally referred to the concentration of land among Egypt’s landed aristocracy in the pre-1952 revolution period (Saad 1999), is used to describe how rural and urban elites who are (or who ally themselves with) members of the state, act as if state resources are their own private property.
It is worth noting that this farm no longer exists, because tenants reoccupied the land on 12 February 2011, that is the day after the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, and sued the farm owners for unlawfully evicting them from the land that they considered their own property (Ahmed 2015). My fieldwork research collected memories of the times when the land was converted to a grape farm.
Primary research included participant observation, 15 life histories in the Qarūn village, around 40 semi-structured interviews with tenants throughout the Qarūn region and three interviews with agricultural engineers who used to supervise the grape farm. Evidence was collected throughout 12 months of ethnographic research and 6 months of archival and secondary research that I conducted as a doctoral student from 2011 until 2013. The Qar ūn region is the 6th district of Fayyūm governorate, a governorate that is distributed within a green oasis surrounded by the desert, except for the southeast where the governorate is connected to the Bani Sueif governorate by a corridor of fertile land. Within Fayyūm, Qarūn is locally known as the madinat al-ashbah, which translates as ‘ghost town’. The district acquired this name because of its remote location as well as its poor and inadequate services. Most government offices in the Youssef Al-Siddīq district are still under construction, thus my interlocutors often had to compete for limited welfare benefits with the residents of other districts. Despite being a privileged agricultural area due to its fertile soil (UNDP 2003, 35), Fayyūm suffers from extreme poverty. The human development index for Egypt ranks it among the five least-developed governorates; it has a low life expectancy (71.9), a low adult literacy rate (57.3%) and a low education index (0.609) (UNDP 2008, 15–37). Fayyūm is one of seven governorates in Egypt whose population does not have full access to safe drinking water (Ministry of Health and Population [Egypt] et al. 2015).
In this article, I tell a story of a domestic land grab as a case of accumulation by dispossession. I do so by focusing on the voices of small farmers who suffered the consequences of this domestic land grab, by posing the following questions: how can we provide a bottom-up conceptualisation of domestic land-grabbing? And in so doing, what kind of conceptual framework could be added to enrich the political economy framework, which still dominates land-grabbing theoretical discussions? In so doing, this article brings two important and complementary theoretical strands that help us understand the lived experience of domestic land-grabbing: the subjective alienating experiences of expelled farmers from land and nature, and the ways in which social inequalities resulting from processes of land-grabbing contribute to breaking the organisms that historically brought to them bodily and economic sustenance.
Taking inspiration from Little’s (2007) work on political ecology, I consider the cosmological, ritual, identity and moral elements to political and economic struggles to make politically marginalised groups visible in environmental conflicts. My aim is to analyse the relation between farmers, land and environment. I describe how dispossessed farmers understand land-grabbing and explain its health and environmental consequences in terms of the social, economic and political ills afflicting Egypt as a whole. For instance, my interlocutors understood that the spread of diseases such as cancer go beyond the pathological, and soil degradation beyond the technical, to implicate the growing of grapes on land previously filled with wheat crops. In their opinion, this led to the increase of toxification, polluted water and air, unsafe food and insecure access to bread, their key dietary staple.
I make two main arguments. First, I argue for the need to weave together two processes which are mutually reinforcing, but which are often analysed separately by the literature. The first is a long historical genealogy of class formation, based on primitive accumulation through the dispossessing of producers. This made the second process – the domestic land grab – not only possible, but also desirable for policymakers and international institutions. Second, I contend that the sensorial dimensions, associated with domestic land-grabbing and the ensuing ecological degradation are key to understanding tenants’ lived experiences, in addition to the political and economic dimensions.
In so doing, I first situate my argument within a recent conceptualisation of Marx's metabolic rift as a premise to connect simultaneously the ‘nature’ and ‘society’ in understanding capitalist processes of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003; Moore 2011; Schneider and McMichael 2010). I then build on recent studies that look at the social worlds of crops, which comprise ‘not only the interactions between people and between people and things but also the technologies, knowledges, infrastructures, institutions, and biological characteristics that mediate those relationships’ (Barnes 2016, 90) in order to analyse the social worlds of wheat and grapes as understood by my interlocutors.
Both approaches speak to the different types of struggles that Egypt’s rural population have witnessed over land as a result of neoliberal land reforms, which favoured landowners and marginalised tenants’ interests. Such struggles culminated in a call for an alternative agriculture policy that was formalised in 2014, when a network of small farmers’ unions (including tenants interviewed for this paper), advocacy non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and researchers managed to bring about the inclusion of an article on food sovereignty in the current Egyptian constitution. The article stipulates that
each citizen has the right to healthy and sufficient food and clean water. The State shall ensure food resources to all citizens. The State shall also ensure sustainable food sovereignty and maintain agricultural biological diversity and types of local plants in order to safeguard the rights of future generations.
Metabolic rift: domestic land grabs, dispossession and ecological degradation
Departing from a revised version of Marx (1963 [1847]) adopted by Foster (1999) and Moore (2011), the concept of metabolic rift employed here embodies ecological relations, challenges the Malthussian and Ricardian separation of agricultural productivity from soil fertility, and contextualises metabolic rift as a process that is time-specific. Marx (1981 [1863–65], 915–916) argues that land exhaustion is a result of the state of agricultural chemistry. In The Poverty of Philosophy, he notes that ‘fertility is not so natural a quality as might be thought; it is closely bound up with the social relations of the time’ (Marx 1963, 162–163). Building on that, David Harvey (2003, 145) notes that primitive accumulation includes a wide-ranging process that includes, among other things, the forced eviction of peasant populations from land, the commodification of land, and the devaluation of alternative (indigenous) forms of knowledge and practices in the domains of production and consumption. This article argues, with Harvey, that the exacerbated resource-depletion of global environmental commons such as land, air and water resulting from capital-intensive modes of agricultural production represents a central mechanism of accumulation by dispossession, a mechanism that he terms ‘the wholesale commodification of nature in all its forms’ (Harvey 2003, 147).
In the Egyptian context, scholars have attributed the change in soil fertility to the capitalist development of agriculture. For instance, Marion Dixon (2014, 236) noted that the liberalisation of the agriculture sector deepened the metabolic rift in the Nile valley and the Delta through the application of Green Revolution technologies and the emergence of a deregulated market for agro-technologies contributing to the widespread contamination of soil, water and crops. While such analysis focuses on the impact of the liberalisation of the agriculture sector on the environment, the focus is more on the political economy dimension than the lived experiences of rural dwellers. This article therefore extends this analysis by grasping the contested understanding of domestic land-grabbing and the ensuing metabolic rift that emerged in five Egyptian villages in the aftermath of the implementation of Law 96 of the year 1992.
This article has shown that evicted tenants connect the simultaneous ecological and social deterioration with the shift in land use and in crop choice from wheat for sustenance to grape for export. Examples of this deterioration are being deprived of environmental resources such as land, water and clean air, being excluded from social networks in agricultural domains such as seed exchanges and non-agricultural domains such as village rituals, and coming full circle to an era that is akin to the pre-1952 period, when they were deprived of the sense of dignity they experienced during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s land reform. Their accounts tell a story of accumulation by dispossession of our time, one that they resisted on the basis not only of the harm to themselves but also of the ecological harm that such accumulation has done to the environment.
The social worlds of wheat and grape
There is no wheat at all grown by the Wālī family. They grow grapes and they make them grow big from hormones, and they sell a kilo for 20 pounds. And they export abroad and bring back in dollar currencies, and then they store the money away. Grapes are used to produce alcohol and grapes kill. Nothing comes back to the country.
The social life of wheat
The small-scale farmers’ argument is substantiated by Egypt’s statistical agricultural records over the years. Drawing on three agricultural censuses over the last 50 years, François Ireton (2009, 32) shows that small and medium farms (2–10 feddans) have played a key role in covering the needs of the national wheat consumption. This is because large and extra-large farms shifted to cash-generating crops to accumulate capital at the expense of covering the national demand for wheat; therefore, evidence suggests that the shift to large-scale farming puts the country at risk in terms of wheat self-sufficiency.
In her review of the social world of wheat, Jessica Barnes (2016) notes that wheat is both a local and a global crop: people have intimate connections to wheat on the one hand, but on the other hand wheat is also a key commodity in the world food market. Barnes (2016, 89) notes that the failure of some governments in Arabic countries to provide wheat as a key staple has been used to symbolise the failure of these governments as a whole. Such analysis finds resonance in my field site. Despite the fact that Egypt was deficient in wheat during the Nasser era (1952–1970) (Ireton 2009, 10), my interlocutors shared a perception that their households were self-sufficient in terms of wheat since they accessed wheat from the very lands that they rented and therefore consider the Nasser era as a golden time. They make the point that Egypt imports more than 50% of its subsistence crops, including wheat. This rhetoric goes back to the Nasserite era when the Egyptian peasant – the fellahin – was considered the backbone of the Egyptian economy. This popular view of the past is well articulated in Reem Saad’s ethnography of farmers’ memories of the agrarian reform during the Nasserite era, perceived by small farmers as a dignified past unlike the unknown present, and the uncertain future (Saad 2004, 184).
There are myriad ways in which my interlocutors engage with wheat. Unlike other crops, wheat has been historically grown almost everywhere in Egypt (Mikhail 2011) and has been fundamental in many social and ritualistic domains. For instance, during my fieldwork, I observed how bread plays a key role in celebrating life and in mourning the dead, and hence, landless women manage to bake bread recipes that are used in such domains. Many fear, however, that with the increased precarity of wheat as a crop, they may not be able to participate in such domains. The day after the wedding, the mother of the bride is expected to send 50 loaves of bread to the bride and groom, along with other food staples. Similarly, every year the families of the deceased distribute bread – known as ‘uras – in the graves of their beloved ones. My point here is not to offer an exotic account of bread consumption in rural Egypt but rather to underline that wheat occupies a sacred status in the countryside, as has been argued by Egyptologists such as Delwin Samuel (1999), and that it has a central role in my interlocutors’ future social lives that is linked to wheat production and consumption.
I am thus focusing on the social world of wheat as a seed, as a plan and as a product. One of the main adverse effects of the land counter-reforms has been the ‘decreased capacity for household self-provisioning’ (Pozzi and El-Sayid 2017, 47). In many cases, smallholder farmers ended up selling their entire harvest and having to buy their own food, usually at higher prices and often of lower quality. Studies have also demonstrated that economic growth did not enhance Egypt’s child nutrition records. A recent report by the International Food Policy Research Institute showed that Egypt’s high economic growth not only failed to alleviate Egypt’s malnutrition records but was also accompanied by an increased prevalence of child stunting, a condition that they argued is ‘atypical for a country outside of wartime’ (IFPRI 2016, 1). Studies on the impact of the agrarian counter-reform stressed that the reference to hunger is literal, rather than metaphorical. These studies show that evicted tenants have changed their dietary habits following the evictions. For example, Saad argues that the change in eating habits that followed the evictions is ‘really a euphemism for eating less in both quantity and quality’ (Saad 2004, 6). Evicted tenants started eating twice instead of three times daily, became dependent on government bakeries for bread consumption, and consumed less meat and no eggs or poultry. Furthermore, ‘sleeping early in order to avoid feeling hungry’ is a common strategy used by tenants to cope with the new situation (LCHR 2002, 151).
It is in such a context that Hassan, one of the evicted tenants, uses the Arabic proverb al-ju’ kaafir (hunger knows no laws) to express the idea that starvation leads to blasphemy, and that those who cause starvation and hunger are considered blasphemous (Ahmed 2015). Hence, hunger is the first experience associated with land-grabbing because it implied relying on state-subsidised breads, which costs 25 Egyptian pounds (EL) (£2.10) for 15 units of baladi bread (Egypt’s staple bread) daily for a month per household.
My informants complained about the quality of subsidised bread, which is considered of low nutritional value and is reportedly less filling than local bread. Unlike their own bread, subsidised baladi bread is regulated by government officials, imposing conditions beyond people's control, including quality dimensions such as the nature of flour and ingredients set by government officials and production conditions set by owners of small-scale private bakeries, the main distribution outlets of such bread, including favouring certain ration-card holders over others (Barnes and Taher 2019). Hagg Sayyid,1 a 70-year-old farmer, claimed that the subsidised bread is expensive and unfulfilling. Many women in the village also criticised the quality of the subsidised bread. Um Hassan, a 50-year-old mother of five, talks about the size and source of subsidised bread. She notes:
The state bread is very small in size and we don’t know where it comes from. Some of it comes to us dark, rotten, wrinkled and cannot be eaten. They say it is the wheat from abroad [men barra]. When I have money, I buy bread from women in the village who bake in their houses. It is usually better than that of the state.
All these qualities resulted in a preferred ranking among edible items whereby home-baked bread is situated at a higher rank than state bread. Such characteristics, as anthropologist of food Ellen Messer (1984) argues, represent a determinant construction of food appropriation and what is considered ‘good’ food for nutrient intake in the local food culture.
The other point raised by Um Mona related to the source of bread. Generally speaking, ‘belad barra’ (foreign countries) are perceived as destinations for accumulating social, financial and cultural capital in al-Ab’adiyya. As in other Egyptian villages, here money sent home by migrants is the biggest source of income. Labour migrants regularly send remittances to the village and created a class of wealthier people with new trends in consumption. For instance, ‘Abdel ‘Alim, one of my informants who had just returned from Libya after 10 years, designed his two-storey house in the style of the house of his boss in Libya. This fascination with other countries, however, does not apply to local food preferences, particularly among women. Although farmers with small land-holdings in Egypt mostly use imported hybrid varieties distributed by agricultural cooperatives, ethnographic evidence suggests that women have a say in the type of seeds used for bread production and often preserve locally propagated varieties (baladi types) (Saad and Ayeb 2013). Here, baladi, which literary means the country, is a concept that is often put in juxtaposition with imported wheat sold on the market or provided by the state and distributed through agriculture cooperatives.
The social life of grapes
In the study area, land-grabbing did not only entail the takeover of small-scale farmers’ land by political and business elites, but also led to wheat – a sacred crop with multiple values – being replaced by grapes, a cash crop for export. My interlocutors stressed the wider implications of establishing a grape farm in their region, including ecological degradation, industrialisation and increased agricultural mechanisation.
Egypt is one of the biggest producers and exporters of grapes in the world (AEC 2019). The export of grapes started in 1996, the year the land reform law was implemented. Grapes were taken up by the Horticulture Export Improvement Association (HEIA), which is defined by its investors as an industry-driven NGO that supports Egypt’s horticulture community through quality improvement and insurance. The NGO also has a Refrigerated Perishables Terminal in Cairo Airport in order to facilitate the export process. Founded in 1993 with the motto ‘Egypt is our farm, the world is our market’,2 The NGO membership increased by 76% between 2002 and 2004 and the organisation has now has over 700 members (HEIA 2019). HEIA’s entrance to the horticulture export business was supported by a USAID grant of US$4.6 million, which was part of the larger ‘Growth through globalization’ programme that began in 1996 by investing US$123 million in agriculture-related projects. The aim of the project, to link producers to markets, is at the heart of the competitiveness and agricultural development programme in Egypt. HEIA is an example of the type of corporate institutions that worked in the field of grape export during the Mubarak era, when business tycoons were either involved directly in political life or through close relatives such as in the case of Abu Gabal Farm. Grape farms, thus, represent one of the businesses that benefited from the political networks of state officials, former bureaucrats and business elites that were created in the process of economic reforms, and which profited the most from privatisation (Sfakianakis 2004, 78).
With a highly competitive network, the export business of grapes thrived, with a continuous and steady increase from 2500 tonnes in 1997, reaching 100,000 tonnes in 2018/2019 according to national statistics (AEC 2019). The two principal exporting periods – so-called export windows – for Egyptian grape farms are May to June and September to November. An estimated 24 Egyptian companies are involved in the export of grapes in Egypt. There are many varieties of table grapes produced in Egypt, like Early Sweet, Superior, Thompson, Flame Seedless, H4, Crimson, and Red Globe as well as Ara varieties. The main export destinations for Egypt are EU countries, Russia, China and Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (AEC 2019).
According to my interlocutors, the land grab was coupled with a substantial water grab via the appropriation of a large-scale irrigation infrastructure. Although the water consumed to cultivate one feddan of grapes is 3500 cubic metres, as opposed to wheat which consumes 4500 cubic metres per feddan, the Abu Gabal farm used drip irrigation rather than the flood irrigation that is used for wheat farming (Fieldwork interview, Fayyum, 25 November 2011). According to some development experts, this may seem like a way to conserve water, but small farmers along with critical rural scholars such as Ayeb (2012) and Barnes (2016) have noted that drip irrigation diverts the water to one area and leaves disadvantaged farmers without water.
Similarly to other places in the world, for example Brazil (Selwyn 2009), the emergence of grape farms gave rise to a new skilled labour force, because grape is one of the most labour-intensive fruits. It is worth noting that one feddan of grape needs 120–140 working days per season, whereby every area of 20 feddans is supervised by one agriculture engineer (Fieldwork interview, Fayyum, 25 November 2011). Most of the labour on the Abu Gabal farm was contractual labour recruited and trained by the agricultural engineers. It is also very unlikely for a small farmer to invest in grapes since the cost of preparing the land is very high: it costs about LE50,000 (US$3088) to put one feddan of grapes into production.
An enquiry about the social world of the grape shows instead that grapes belong to a world that is alien to my informants, who are not involved in the process of seed selection; management practices take place off-farm and, unlike traditional crops, local resources are adapted to meet the export market (rather than vice versa); no networks of farmers’ seed exchange are involved, and grapes as an end-product are not accessible to them. This alienation is sometimes expressed in the moral allegations that take shape as rumours, conspiracy theories, and outright accusations and/or denunciations of elites known or suspected to be affiliated with grape farms. For instance, a widespread rumour in my field site concerned allegations about the end point of consumption. While the farm was dedicated to table grapes, one common refrain was that such grapes were farmed with the goal of making wine, an alcoholic drink that is considered haram in Islam and has thus a negative connotation in the religious landscape of villagers. This point is illustrated in the following interview:
It was not easy for me seeing grapes growing on my land, right in front of my eyes, seeing these big trucks coming to the village to take the grapes away in large refrigerators, imagining that the product of my land will go to Europe, Holland I think, and will end up as an alcoholic drink for Europeans.
Tenants farmers often noted other consequences associated with living around a grape farm. They adopted an environmental narrative that puts at the forefront the negative consequences of introducing cash crops, widely using fertilisers and establishing a fertiliser factory by the same farm owner that toxified the area where they live. In other words, they attribute air and water toxicity in their area to the introduction of the pesticides that were applied to the vast mono-cropped tracts of grapes. A widespread ‘fact’ among farmers is that Wālī deliberately targeted this area by establishing the factory to serve the needs of the farm, causing the deaths of many residents, particularly children. While it was not possible to validate this causal relation, it is important to still recognise the ways in which tenants recognise the environmental costs of such a factory on their health:
He opened a factory here in Qarun, and we knew nothing about its side effects, but when we used it, we realized it was destroying everything. It killed the crops, polluted water and many of our children were diagnosed with cancer, and five died as a result.
Conclusion
This article has investigated a process of domestic land-grabbing that has been promoted by the government under the banner of agricultural development, while legitimising often violent episodes of land expropriation and displacement of local small-scale farmers.
I showed that the domestic land grab was reinforced by a process of accumulation by dispossession as erstwhile owners established a grape farm for export, evicting local tenants who had used the land to farm wheat. Evicted tenants oppose a wider set of negative, long-term consequences enabled by the counter-revolution initiated by the 1996 land law reforms. For them, these consequences physically materialised in the shift of land use from wheat – a substance crop for local and domestic consumption – to grapes, a cash crop for export.
Rather than romanticising farmers’ attachment to wheat or celebrating their opposition to grapes and land-grabbing, this paper showed how farmers whose lands were grabbed create meanings and make sense of the dramatic transformations of rural society. It is through the sharp contrast of the social worlds of these two crops that evicted tenants articulate their lived experience of domestic land grab and the negative effects it had on their lives. Such effects are not solely economic and political, related to the loss of livelihoods and a return to feudal relations: they also have a sensorial dimension associated with the shift in land use, which is a microcosm of the negative impact of the agricultural liberalisation on small-scale and landless farmers. This domestic land grab has triggered local resistance and political struggle to reclaim the commons, both via land occupations and through legal action. Local resistance contributed to the reimagining of an alternative to the current Egyptian agricultural policy, which culminated in passing a food sovereignty article in Egypt’s 2014 Constitution. However, the article was not translated into current Egyptian laws (El Nour 2017).
What would then be some principles and goals for forward-looking ecology that brings closure to these lived experiences of the metabolic rift? This would start by recognising the ecological roles that small-scale and landless farmers play in Egypt’s agricultural sector. While current policies are in favour of large investors, political mobilisation in the region, even if currently on hold due to the crackdown on social movements, could lead to different policies that prioritise the interests of small-scale farmers.