Introduction
Since the early 2010s, scholars in critical agrarian studies have analysed the global land grab extensively (White et al. 2012; Edelman, Oya, and Borras 2013). While the initial focus in the ‘land grab debate’ was narrow (De Schutter 2011; Deininger 2011), critical research has gradually widened its boundaries, exploring the political economy and politics of transnational land deals, their relation to processes of restructuring of the corporate food regime (McMichael 2013), and the emergence of new green agendas (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012). Africa has been at the centre of critical research on the global land grab (Allan et al. 2012; Cotula 2013; Hall, Scoones, and Tsikata 2015) and this journal has played a key role within critical research on land-grabbing in Africa. In 2011, Issue 182, edited by Bush, Bujra, and Littlejohn (2011) kick-started the journal's debate on land grabs in Africa.
Yet, while the African continent has been at the centre of debates on the global land grab since they began, North Africa has been largely ignored. This blind spot contrasts with the presence of extensive literature on the region on themes such as the centrality of the politics of land to processes of state-building and class formation in the post-independence period (Bouderbala, Chraïbi, and Pascon 1974; Abdel-Fadil 1975); the re-opening of the land question and a profound (re-)politicisation of land under neoliberalism in the context of a wider project of social transformation in which agriculture and the rural world were put at the centre (Bush 2002; Ayeb 2010; Vianey, Requier-Desjardins, and Paoli 2015); the long thread of rural dispossession that characterised these processes (Bush 2011; Elloumi 2013; Hanieh 2013); and more recently the key role of dispossession in establishing the structural conditions fuelling rural protests and social movements (Ayeb and Bush 2014; El Nour 2015; Gana 2017).
This Forum on the land question and the politics of agrarian change in post-revolutionary Egypt features three original articles based on empirical research carried out in recent years. Collectively, the Forum contributes to two different streams of literature. First of all, it considerably extends the insights emerging from the existing initial studies on processes of land-grabbing in Egypt and North Africa (Rignall 2016; Henderson 2017). Second, it further develops initial work carried out over the last decades on the land question and the politics of agrarian change in Egypt and North Africa in the neoliberal period by scholars specialised in the region's political economy and in North African rural studies (Bush 2011; Elloumi et al. 2011; Bessaoud 2013; Hanieh 2013).
In this introductory article, we revisit the land question in North Africa – and especially in Egypt and the Maghreb – to bridge two separate debates that have so far proceeded separately from each other: the debate on land-grabbing, carried out within the field of critical agrarian studies, and that on land in North Africa, led by experts on the region. We first analyse the recent literature on ‘global’ land-grabbing in North Africa to then review the literature on the land question in North Africa. Third, we introduce the four articles by highlighting their contributions. We conclude by identifying what seems to us most relevant for future critical research on land issues and land-grabbing in North Africa.
The silence on North Africa in the land grab debate
North Africa, its peasantry and its rural population have been largely neglected in recent debates on the global land grab. With the notable exception of Sudan, the region is almost invisible in the vast body of literature on the phenomenon. Indeed, Sudan was identified as a ‘hotspot’ for the most recent wave of international land acquisitions already in the early reports (Cotula et al. 2009). By contrast, North Africa as a whole is not considered to be a key target region for recent investments. For example, Sudan excluded, the Land Matrix stores information concerning only 15 operations carried out in the region (eight in Egypt, four in Morocco, two in Tunisia and one in Algeria). The total intended size of these projects amounts to 4.2 million hectares of land (Land Matrix 2019a) – an area that could appear relatively modest in comparison to the almost 50 million hectares estimated to be at the centre of transnational deals taking place worldwide over the last two decades (Land Matrix 2019b), or to the total amount of agricultural land in the different states of the region, reported at about 85.7 million hectares (FAOSTAT 2019). What is more, the majority of these registered acquisitions concerns land areas located at fringes of oases or ‘desert land’ (e.g. Toshka or Sharq al Oweinat in Egypt; Adrar in Algeria) – a location that makes it easier for proponents of the deals to describe the target areas as ‘empty’, ‘marginal’ or ‘under-utilised’ land (Rignall 2016).
Yet, while these notions have been vehemently criticised by various scholars (e.g. Borras et al. 2011), and the politics and political economy of land acquisitions have been explored in depth in many other regions of the global South, very few articles published since 2008 associate the keywords ‘land grab’ – or its French equivalents – with the expressions ‘North Africa’, ‘Maghreb’ or the name of one of the countries of the region (Mahdi 2014; Woertz and Keulertz 2015). The stream of the literature rooted in critical agrarian studies makes no exception to this. The academic journals that have been the main outlets for this stream of critical research – i.e. The Journal of Peasant Studies, The Journal of Agrarian Change, Development and Change, Third World Quarterly, and Globalizations – have published almost no articles providing an analysis on issues of land dispossession or the politics of land in North Africa or one of the region's countries since 2008. This journal represents an exception in this respect. In 2014, it published an article by Dixon (2014) that arguably represents the most original and thorough intervention in the global land grab debate from the vantage point of the region to date. However, while situating it within the framework of the regional dynamics of restructuring and financialisation of the corporate food regime, Dixon's analysis mostly focuses on the role of Egyptian finance capital in land grabs in Sudan and other neighbouring countries.
Similarly, the literature on the global land grab – even in its most critical expressions – has mostly portrayed North African states and private investors as ‘grabbers’ of land and water resources in other African countries (Daniel 2012; Woodhouse 2012). Several studies provide further evidence on the involvement of Egyptian government agencies, agribusiness companies and finance capital in countries of the Nile basin (Keulertz 2012; Verhoeven 2012). Others document the role of Libyan public companies and private investors in instances of land- and water-grabbing in Mali (Adamczewski and Hugon 2013) or in other countries of Africa (Williams 2015). Finally, Woertz and Keulertz (2015, 1107) discuss Morocco's ‘active interest’ in land and agricultural investments in West Africa.
However, only a few general studies indicate North African countries other than Sudan – namely Egypt and Morocco – as the target of transnational land acquisitions (Cotula et al. 2009; Woertz 2012). Similarly, only a handful of studies have provided a further exploration of these deals. Henderson (2017) focuses on Gulf investments for agricultural purposes in Egypt's ‘desert lands’ since the mid 1990s. He shows that investors and private and public companies based in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf Cooperation Council member states represent the main foreign capital behind the operations carried out in the country over the last two decades. He provides evidence that investments concern both the purchase of vast areas of land within state-promoted reclamation projects (often in the region of several tens of thousands of hectares) and the establishment of farms on privately reclaimed desert land in other areas of the country. Addressing the issue of the direction of change in land use associated with these acquisitions (Hall 2011; Borras and Franco 2012), Henderson also provides evidence that these investments are mainly aimed at the production of agri-food commodities used by Gulf-owned regional agri-food conglomerates operating both in Egypt and in the Gulf countries. Moreover, echoing evidence from other regions that led to the formulation of concept of ‘control grabbing’ (Borras et al. 2012), he shows that these investments are embedded in Gulf-investors’ strategies of vertical integration of regional agri-food supply chains. Arafat and El Nour (2019) analyse the complex agricultural investment network which intertwined UAE, Saudi and Egyptian companies and private investors closely linked to these governments. They argue that this network facilitates indirect deals with several other food and agricultural companies and leads to an increased control of the food supply chain by both Egyptian and foreign investors.
In the Maghreb, scholarly attention has also been directed towards investment projects that could be described as instances of ‘green grabbing’ – ‘the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends’ (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012, 238). Ben Saad and Elloumi (2015) reveal the major significance of such projects within a larger wave of transnational land acquisitions of Tunisian public lands in the country since the 2000s. They document that green grabs entail instances of both the legal expropriation of rangelands and forests, with the ostensible aim of protecting natural resources, and the illegal de facto appropriation of land for the creation of private game lands for wealthy and well-connected members of the regional elite. Similarly to Henderson (2017), these authors underscore the key role played by Gulf investors within these grabs, while also documenting the involvement of European actors, such as the Swiss Holding Group, which acquired 164,000 hectares of public desert land located in the governorate of Tataouine for the establishment of an industrial tree plantation aimed at the export-oriented production of biomass.
Finally, Rignall (2016) explores the case of the acquisition of 3000 hectares of land located in Ouarzazate, Morocco on the fringes of the Sahara. Previously owned by the collectivity of Ait Oukrour Toundout, this government expropriation occurred within the framework of an investment plan to set up a major solar energy plant by establishing a transnational partnership between the Moroccan public agencies, foreign governments and private actors. She argues that while the investment is part of a national strategy ostensibly aimed at reducing Morocco's dependency on imported fossil fuel, it looks more like the first phase of a European initiative to secure an increasing share of Europe's energy needs from a vast network of solar and wind farms stretching across North Africa.
These articles speak to central themes of critical research on the global land grab, revealing the central role of the state in the recent land deals (Hall 2011; Wolford et al. 2013). The Gulf investments analysed by Henderson (2017) mainly entail acquisition of lands within state-promoted projects of land reclamation that represent one of the main drivers in the making of the desert frontier in Egypt (Dixon 2017). This is consistent with Egypt's ‘agricultural strategy without farmers’ undertaken under Hosni Mubarak and centred on the promotion of export-oriented production of high-value crops at the expenses of the production of national staple food (see Bush 2000). Ben Saad and Elloumi (2015) similarly stress the role played in this process by the Tunisian state. They show how the green grabs analysed are integral to national plans to protect natural resources and promote a sustainable development of pastoralism and other state programmes to establish natural reserves and protect local species under threat of extinction. The central role of the state is even more evident in the case analysed by Rignall (2016) where the government is the initiator of the acquisition. Interestingly, Ben Saad and Elloumi (2015) reveal the key role of local elites (Keene et al. 2015) in controlling public Tunisian resources for personal purposes, as do Arafat and El Nour (2019) in Egypt by highlighting the involvement of investors close to the government. In the same way, Rignall (2016) underscores the key role played by the three collective land representatives of the different factions of the tribe in facilitating the land acquisition.
These complex dynamics characterise political responses from below (Hall, Scoones, and Tsikata 2015). Rignall (2016) interestingly shows the existence of tensions between the transnational advocacy deal led by European non-governmental organisations (NGOs) mobilised against the ‘EU energy grabs’ and local popular resistance. While transnational advocacy said very little about land tenure issues, ‘popular resistance focused on claiming historical tenure rights and sustaining rural livelihoods, but it was also about enabling residents, the formally collective owners, to extract some of the emergent values being created through that land’ (Rignall 2016, 13). Such resistance was neutralised by the state, which turned this claim into a technocratic issue of community development and participation. Crucially, it is in relation to these processes of land control appropriation that the French translations for land or resource ‘grabbing’ (‘accaparement’ foncier, de terre ou de ressources) have initially appeared in publications on the Maghreb (Elloumi 2013; Mahdi 2014; Vianey, Requier-Desjardins, and Paoli 2015), even if they rarely make explicit reference to critical agrarian studies.
Thus, despite the general silence on North Africa in the land grab debate, a few scholars have engaged with the topic, and have explored important dimensions such as transnational investments, its intra-regional dynamics and the role of national governments and domestic elites. Arguably, however, this literature has only provided a very marginal exploration of ongoing processes of land-grabbing and dispossession. As Hall (2011) has argued, the most recent investor rush is a multifaceted phenomenon, involving not only transnational acquisitions but also domestic land grabs. Consequently, an exclusive focus on its global and intra-regional dimensions obscures the importance of parallel processes involving domestic actors. Similarly, a focus on large-scale deals loses sight of smaller processes of grabbing, which a historical lens could help to visualise (Edelman, Oya, and Borras 2013) by situating these latest waves of acquisitions as the aftermath of previous cycles. With Greco (2015), we believe that situating explorations of land grabs within broader analyses of the land question is crucial in order to fully grasp its multiple aspects and political dynamics. Consequently, in the next section we revisit the land question in North Africa paying particular attention to the neoliberal era.
The land question in North Africa in the neoliberal era
The land question and the politics of land have been central topics in critical research by regional scholars in both the fields of anglophone critical agrarian studies and the francophone études rurales. In the region, there is a long thread of dispossession dating back to the colonial period (Poncet 1961; Bourdieu and Sayad 1964; Dumont 1972). For these reasons, land reforms were a key element of post-independence governments, and land politics have been central to state (Bouderbala, Chraïbi, and Pascon 1974) as well as class formation (Abdel-Fadil 1975; Pascon and Ennaji 1986). Land reclamation, privatisation of public land (Bessaoud 2013; Elloumi 2013) and individualisation of collective tribal land (Bourbouze et al. 1997; Ben Saad et al. 2010) have been proactively promoted by the state in the context of broader reforms inspired by international financial institutions, supporting the intensification of agricultural production and the deeper incorporation of family farming into global value chains (Jouili 2008; Akesbi 2013).
In the neoliberal period, reforms have set in motion a (re-)politicisation of land and processes of accumulation by dispossession facilitated by counter-reforms, especially in the whole 2000s (Ayeb 2010; Bush 2011). Bush, in particular, has argued that under Mubarak the dominant political and economic coalition in Egypt has used land as a vehicle for capital accumulation. In the country, the implementation of the neoliberal agrarian ‘counter-reform’ (Bush 2002) centred on the liberalisation of land rental markets, which had been frozen by the agrarian reform under Gamal Abdel Nasser. In 1992, the implementation of Law no. 96 opened a Pandora's box of claims and counterclaims and precipitated a rush in which various types of owners claimed different types of land – including land not covered by the law. This entails a vast process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003), whereby old and new landlords have attempted, often successfully, to regain ‘their’ lands, triggering a process of domestic land grab.
These policies accelerated the double and interlinked process of land fragmentation and concentration (Elloumi and Jouve 2003) and have been strengthening the processes of class formation in both rural and urban areas (Sethom 1992; Mahdi 2005). Although the existing land policies change from one country to another, a large body of literature is in agreement that the neoliberal reforms have thus resulted in a process of heightened social differentiation. This process is evident in the increase in inequalities between producers at a local level, and in the impoverishment and marginalisation of a large proportion of peasants – generally the poorer ones, and the ones with less ‘political’ connections – in countries as diverse as Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
Importantly, the literature on the Maghreb concurs with that on Egypt in indicating that domestic actors are the main actors responsible for processes of land appropriation in North Africa, exploiting, benefiting from and/or bypassing the legal framework (Jouve et al. 2010; Bush 2011; Elloumi et al. 2011). Several studies have emphasised how national business people benefit from public policies for their investments (Dahou et al. 2011; Bessaoud 2016; Baroud, Colin, and Daoudi 2018), while others highlight renewed tribal and family capital accumulation (Ben Saad et al. 2010; Tabib 2011) that are in line with older processes (Zghal 1967; Lahmar 1994). In the case of Egypt, such a key role has been documented by Dixon, focusing on the role of Egyptian financial capital in the process. She has shown that ‘frontier-making’ involved smallholders and medium-sized agricultural entrepreneurs as well as family business groups (Dixon 2017, 91). In the same way, Acloque Desmulier reveals that reclaiming the desert strengthens the economic power of Egyptian corporate firms (2017) but also of the national army, especially since Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's assumption of power (2019). Likewise, in the case of Morocco, Gharios and Mahdi (2019) highlight that the Green Morocco Plan attracts real-estate agents and trading companies investing in the Saiss region, whereas Houdret, Kadiri, and Bossenbroek (2017) bring to light an emerging bourgeoisie benefiting from the new environment and the emerging new contours of the political economy of land and agriculture. Many scholars have shown that the privatisation of public groundwater or common renewable resources has increased the inequalities between the richer and the poorer farmers (Bédoucha 1987; Ayeb 2010), but also intensified their negotiations with each other and with state agents (Amichi et al. 2012; Riaux, Giraldi, and Nouri 2015; Kuper et al. 2016). By emphasising both the logic of the market and the symbolic aspects of appropriation, they highlight how global norms and laws are used by farmers at local level in order to accumulate resources, better their situation (Dahou et al. 2011; Venot, Kuper, and Zwarteveen 2017) or increase regime stability (Houdret 2012). This emerging literature starts enriching more explicitly the dialogue with the ‘land grab debate’ – understood in a broad sense – by including the ‘water dimension’ (Mehta, Veldwisch, and Franco 2012). In a word, the state has been playing a major role in resource appropriation by a wide range of domestic actors following different strategies but generally reinforcing class differentiation.
All of these processes have been resisted beyond the localised instances that are mentioned by works cited above (Ben Saad and Elloumi 2015; Rignall 2016). One of the most interesting elements in the recent works is that they have brought to light how access and control over resources have been at the root of local and social protests in several North African countries. For example, Bush (2011) has discussed the emergence in the 2010s of rural coalitions against dispossession to resist these processes. Later, other authors (Ayeb and Bush 2014; El Nour 2015; Gana 2017) further documented the role played by farmers in the social protests that marked the aftermath of the fall of Mubarak and the central role that contestations around land have played in this process. Similarly, in the case of Tunisia, the literature has explored the role that processes of rural dispossession have played in laying the ground for the Tunisian revolution and subsequent social protests (Ayeb 2011; Elloumi 2013; Fautras 2015). Recently, Gana and Taleb (2019) have highlighted how teachers and local activists in Jemna joined the protest, creating a new association to manage the palm plantation they are occupying. However, these changes in power relations should not prevent one from raising the question of who benefits from them and how this process contributes to class formation. The same can be said about Morocco, where struggles over collective lands and their privatisation have also made space for new actors and intermediate organisations in establishing a coalition crossing the social divide (Berriane 2016). In our opinion, such elements call for further analysis of the reinforcement and renewal of class relations, based on protests and resistances to land control (see De Lellis 2019).
The articles in this Forum and issue: re-emphasising the role of domestic actors
A shared focus of the articles is the observation that, in North Africa, primitive accumulation through land grabs is currently driven by the national bourgeoisie of each country and thus appears mainly as a process of domestic land grab that goes beyond large-scale land acquisitions by foreign actors.
Christian Henderson's article (in this issue, though not part of the original Forum) expands upon his previous work on Gulf land acquisitions in Egypt and North Africa. In his article, he provides a thorough exploration of the role played by Gulf capital in the consolidation of a corporate food regime in Egypt and the region. He crucially shows that Gulf investments in land have been paralleled by investments in other segments of agri-food supply chains, ranging from input production, to commerce, finance and retail. A key argument that the author puts forward is that within the established food regime, several ‘[c]orporations control supply chains from the farm to the supermarket and they have established monopoly control of agribusiness production’ (Henderson 2019). Within this regime, Gulf capital and companies are key players. They own majority and minority stakes in 14 of the 29 companies listed in the food and agriculture index of the Egyptian exchange. These and other major agribusiness companies operate across the region and have established ‘vertically integrated and disintegrated supply chains’ (Ibid.). Egypt represents for them one of the largest markets. In Egypt, they control large, and growing, market shares of several industries. These findings have brought authors to suggest the need to refocus on wider processes of control grabbing occurring within agri-food supply chains in parallel with processes of outright land dispossession.
On the other hand, Henderson's article crucially relates his exploration of these investments to an analysis of the trajectories of class formation at the regional and national level. In so doing, he argues that ‘Gulf capital's class power in Egypt is based on its relationship with the authoritarian “state–capital nexus” (Abdelrahman 2014, 11)’ (Henderson 2019). He does expand the exploration of the Egyptian counterparts, showing how the emerging capitalist class includes not only Egyptian finance capital – as previously documented by Dixon (2014) – but also state agencies such as the army. Thus, he documents the partnership between Gulf capital and the army both in the domain of farming – for example in the area of Sharq El Oweinat where half of the land is farmed by the army and the other half is rented or owned by Gulf-owned companies – including Jenaan, a firm owned by the emirate of Abu Dhabi. It also appears in the field of food retail, where Gulf-owned supermarket brands operate and where the army uses its influence to mediate investments (Henderson 2019).
The other articles in this Forum focus on the domestic dimension of land control and considerably deepen the analysis by showing the heterogeneity of the actors involved in domestic land grabs.
Saker El Nour contributes to deepening our understanding of land reclamation and gives insights into the trajectories of agrarian change and the changing power and class relations. He explores the ways in which these agribusiness projects relate to other categories of land users and farmers present on these lands and emphasises that they have a longer common history. Arguing that analysis of land-grabbing in Egypt needs to go beyond attention to international investors, he particularly explores issues of ‘land-grabbing from below’ those occupying land under squatters' rights – members of the local elites. El Nour clearly sets out the ongoing conflicts between different fractions of the elites and of capital. Drawing on legal dispossession processes through land commodification and on the use of non-economic means of accumulation, he focuses on who is profiting from land reclamation projects. As in the Fayyum case (by Ahmed), it appears that the key actors are capitalist investors who are also political and economic figures at the national level. El Nour also emphasises the role of the Upper Egypt urban petty bourgeoisie collectively reclaiming land and the involvement of rural local elites and middle-scale farmers who have accumulated capital through Gulf work emigration. The aim of the local elites and investors is to formalise ownership of their individual property rather than developing agricultural production, in order to respectively gain social prestige or economic capital through selling the land after legalisation. Land management is shaped by the institutional ambiguity created by the coexistence of old and new land regulations. This situation opens the route to bureaucratic or political decisions regarding land allocation by state agents – especially at crucial political moments such as elections.
He then argues that all the contending main actors in contemporary struggles over land in Wadi al-Nukra are anything but small farmers. Their land possession thus has the cumulative effect of marginalising small farmers and local land users – even when some of these farmers are among the beneficiaries of land distribution projects. El Nour calls for more detailed research into these processes, to unpack the categories of grabbers versus the dispossessed. He also emphasises the analysis of resistance from below and consideration of the strategies of different fractions of the Egyptian and local elites involved in these processes. He explicitly contests the romanticised vision of informal strategies of encroachment as a ‘resistance’ carried out by popular classes.
Yasmine Moataz Ahmed focuses on a case that has involved members of the government – namely the former minister of agriculture and architect of the neoliberal reforms. Like El Nour, she offers a better understanding of historical class formation since the 1970s in the Fayyum region. The bourgeoisie as a class has been strengthened through primitive accumulation that legally sanctioned the dispossession of tenants and allowed domestic land grab by Egyptian oligarchs. By interrogating tenants' perceptions of changes in the region, Ahmed's article addresses the ways in which landlords made use of lands in the aftermath of the counter-reforms. The article analyses how the former agriculture minister's family has invested in grapes as an export crop after taking over small farmers’ land. It argues that land acquisition helps to consolidate the Egyptian elite's agri-business before the wave of land-grabbing that occurred after the 2007/08 crisis. Nevertheless, Ahmed emphasises that the key players in domestic land-grabbing are the same as the ones carrying out global land-grabbing processes that are described by other authors.
By focusing on voices of small farmers who were harmed economically, physically and culturally from land deals, Ahmed highlights the concrete consequences of land accumulation and industrialisation for the inhabitants, e.g. increases in pesticides and lack of economic resources. By highlighting the affective dimension of land-grabbing, she revives analytical and methodological questions in the land grab debate: what does land grab mean, and how should it be studied? Does land grab only refer to the material aspects of dispossession and to a top-down conceptualisation? Taking into account the way dispossession is lived and understood by villagers and farmers significantly extends the scope of land grab research. Ahmed advances the question for those engaged in critical research and action on land grab, with the objective of contributing to struggles for social justice. While struggles and definitions over what is and what is not a ‘land grab’ within the academy and within official spheres of land governance is a crucial task, Ahmed rightly notes that those concerned with defending the interests affected by the land- and resource-grabbing process might be better advised to start from the definition adopted by the affected people themselves. Dispossession is not only about material elements but also about the social order, the symbolic norms and representations associated with ways of using and controlling land. The destruction of the previously existing social world of wheat for the establishment of a new social world of grapes is a story also of health and environmental degradation linked to the new ways of farming the land.
Francesco De Lellis's article explores the wave of domestic land-grabbing of the previous decades by analysing mobilisations of farmers in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution. He focuses on two elements: direct action in the form of land occupations to regain access to land from which farmers had been evicted; and a drive towards unionisation resulting in a network of independent peasants’ unions. De Lellis responds to calls for a more comprehensive understanding of dynamics of peasant resistance and crucially argues that no direct link can be established between dispossession and direct action. He highlights the relationships between farmers at the grassroots and urban political allies in NGOs (Edelman and Borras 2016). Having emerged during the 2000s – in what Bush (2011) called networks of resistance – these external allies have played a major role in articulating the interests, strategies and modes of action of the dispersed protests. De Lellis's article contributes to literature on political reactions from below (Hall, Scoones, and Tsikata 2015) by exploring the role these allies have played in mobilisations and to what extent they have influenced trajectories and outcomes.
The article corroborates a pattern emerging in recent analyses of political reactions from below to land-grabbing (Rignall 2016): on the one hand, there are occurrences of resistance carried out in the sphere of civil society – at the transnational and national level – by actors claiming to represent the interests of farmers and local communities affected by land-grabbing. On the other, there are occurrences of local resistance and reactions by people affected – mainly taking place in the local sphere. Not only are these not the same, they do not even always overlap. If urban allies in the farmers’ movement do play an important role in translating local demands in the national and transnational political sphere, their views, strategies and aims might not overlap with those of the farmers. This situation might lead to a conflictual relationship with local people and jeopardise the end result of the struggle. De Lellis thus shows how difficult resistance is, in the context of domestic land-grabbing, and why the crucial task of developing and maintaining the occupations failed. The plurality of unions and networks had set up an important dialectic and debate. Yet any further development was prevented by the brutal and rapid repression that closed spaces for advocacy and action. The author juxtaposes the role of networks of allies, and of broader political opportunities, with the difficulties of fighting against a reconsolidating regime and its landed interests, with their powerful backing.
Conclusions
The four articles featured in this Editorial have two broad contributions to offer. First, they link the analysis of the politics of land to processes of class formation (Oya 2013; Greco 2015). While Henderson focuses on the transnational dimension of these processes through analysis of the connection between Gulf capitalists, Egyptian finance capital and state agencies in Egypt, El Nour and Ahmed emphasise their national and local dimension. Consistently with evidence emerging from other recent studies (Acloque Desmulier 2019; Arafat and El Nour 2019), they collectively reveal the diversity of classes of capital (Bernstein 2010) involved in processes of land-grabbing that are embedded in a long history of rural dispossession which preceded the last wave of investments. De Lellis enriches these analyses with insights on the class dynamics of resistance and responses from below. Second, the articles revisit key issues that were at the centre of the foundational debates in the Review of African Political Economy, such as the role of transnational capital, without downplaying the role and the operations of national bourgeoisies in countries marked by dependent capitalism. What is interesting is that they show how different regional, national and local classes of capital are repositioning within the broader process of corporate food regime restructuring (McMichael 2013) and its regional dynamics. At the same time, they also provide an interesting initial analysis of how relations of production are changing in specific local settings and of their implications for class dynamics of agrarian change that deserve further research.
However, this Forum leaves several issues open. One is how to further integrate the ‘water dimension’ (Mehta, Veldwisch, and Franco 2012) in discussions on the politics of land and the associated dynamics of agrarian change in North Africa, as water is crucial to processes of dispossession in ways that clearly intersect with the stories analysed here (Ayeb 2010; Vianey, Requier-Desjardins, and Paoli 2015; Arafat and El Nour 2019). Moreover, how are new green agendas changing the picture? They now dominate mainstream advocacy for agricultural development, and a major concern is that grabbing processes described here are boosted by the leitmotiv of ‘greening the desert’ (Dixon 2017) both in Egypt and in other North African countries. Moreover, as shown by other studies discussed in this introduction (Ben Saad and Elloumi 2015; Rignall 2016), green-grabbing processes affect sectors other than agriculture also in North Africa. Key questions need to be further addressed: are these processes feeding further dispossession? What trajectories of rural restructuring and social change do they promote? Last but not least, the articles featured here show that the new forms of agricultural production associated with processes of land-grabbing often rely on labour regimes based on the recourse to waged labour on large- and medium-sized farms, as well as to seasonal work as a complement to family labour on small plots. Similar evidence emerges from other recent analyses on the political economy of land, agri-food restructuring and agrarian change in North Africa (Dixon 2017; Ayeb and Bush 2019). Yet, the labour dimension of current trajectories of agricultural restructuring remains largely unaddressed in these studies. Recent scholarship on Morocco – the most notable exception in this respect – has started to shed important light on the trajectories and highly gendered nature that characterise the ongoing process of making of a new agricultural working class in several of the country's emerging farming districts (Nieto 2014; Bouchelkha 2017). Thorough research would be needed on the labour question in North African agri-food systems also in other national and local contexts. Finally, further research on the forms of resistance to what the literature portrays as increasingly differentiated agrarian classes of labour remains crucial, in order to deepen debate on the future prospects of an emancipatory rural politics.