Introduction
This article explores recent international financial institution (IFI) and national government policy in North Africa to address the climate emergency (described as climate change). We focus on the World Bank, along with the FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations). The World Bank wields the strongest financial and administrative muscle, including scores of consultant ‘experts’ in dialogue with North African governments. Situating government policy and contemporary funding initiatives within the long trend of World Bank strategy, since 1970, food insecurity has worsened and so too have the living conditions and poverty of most small-scale family farmers and landless people (Bush 2016; Bush and Martiniello 2017). IFI policy has advanced trade-based food security that has ignored small-scale family farmers, except when adaptive self-reliance is called upon to promote managed sustainability (Moyo 2016).
Development assistance promotes policies of mitigation and adaptation to climate change without addressing why family farmers have remained poor and how that poverty is reproduced. Understanding the impact of the climate emergency and the failures of policy to address it requires understanding North Africa’s uneven incorporation into global capitalism, including the political imposition of vulnerability, such as vulnerability to climate change, onto North Africa’s popular classes, a process which goes back decades.1 We demonstrate that IFI interventions relating to the climate emergency naturalise the power of the northern donors who caused climate change (Hickel 2020). Policy discourse seems to identify small-scale farmer practices as contributing to the crisis, yet IFIs also require small farmers to be lead actors in ameliorating the consequences of the climate emergency. IFIs therefore sidestep the processes which have made the majority of the region’s farmers, and their households, poor. In doing so, the necessary solutions are a priori ruled out: popular and sovereign eco-development (Sachs 1974), putting an ecological spin on policies widely mooted in North Africa during the developmentalist ‘Golden Age’, even if these were never implemented (Ajl n.d.).
We first examine North Africa’s uneven incorporation into the world system, before highlighting specific dimensions of the contemporary environmental emergency. We outline overall North African tendencies in agricultural production, import-export balances, and their class basis. The shift from the 1960s onwards towards technologically intensive, and from the 1970s, larger farmer-oriented, agrarian policies has contributed to worsening rural poverty and structural import-export imbalances, while undermining the socio-technical agro-ecologies and forms of knowledge which could have been the basis for resilient and popular-based rural development policies (Akesbi 2014; Ayeb 2012; Bush 1999; 2014; Woertz 2017). Such shifts were premised, furthermore, on the rejection of alternatives. We analyse these tendencies within larger macro-structures: first, global accumulation; how metropolitan/core countries have slotted the periphery into patterns of product specialisation and pushed them away from small farmer-oriented policies; and how war has shaped these policies, with rising regional warfare going alongside declining labour shares of value on a world scale (Kadri 2014). This process has been the social underside of worldwide accumulation (Amin 1974). The creation of labour reservoirs is not separate from polarised accumulation and the enclosure of the atmosphere as a waste dump for the by-products of industrialisation, but inseparable from it (Ajl 2023). The concepts of value extraction and accumulation are ways of understanding historical processes, including systematic waste of the natural basis of human survival. Reconstructing this history is necessary to clarify both the required changes, and who has sought to avert them and impose their own policies upon the poor (Kadri 2023).
Our analysis focuses on broad policy trends and some outcomes for small-scale farmers in North Africa. We note a continuous theme in agricultural policy, reflecting unresolved agrarian questions of land, labour and ecology (Moyo, Jha, and Yeros 2013). The throughline is an absence of small farmer voices and consultation, with little reference to the long-term implications for the people who are the declared beneficiaries of policy. This is not just the result of a knowledge deficit, although the lack of rigorous national data collection is evident. It is because the overall policy thrust is grounded in particular views of ‘development’ – the recurrent theme that technology can ameliorate farming, agriculture and the climate emergency, and of ‘development’ reflecting the interests of monopoly capital. The failures of declared policy also relate to attempts to sustain global exploitation, which in fact lies at the heart of the climate emergency.
We conclude with a counter to the mainstream IFI narrative. We offer an agenda that places farmers and their communities at the centre of policy practice to boost sustainable food production and access, and reduce the impacts of the climate emergency. The climate emergency can only be effectively understood if seen as part of the lived experience of family farmers and landless people, and they are fully integrated into policy reform (Rignall 2019). Given the opportunity, farmers deploy agro-ecological techniques to sustain their livelihoods and manage the climate emergency. This can be linked to a broader rethinking of sustainable national and sovereign development models. Space limitations restrict what we can elaborate here, but these techniques are captured by the broader debate about food sovereignty and self-reliant development (Dowidar 1984), alongside land-to-the-tiller agrarian reform (Claeys, Desmarais, and Singh 2021; Akram-Lodhi 2015).
The origins of North African food dependence
The Arab region (Figure 1) is the world’s most food-import dependent (FAO 2023). Within it, North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt), despite its large arid zones, has much land with adequate rainfall or which is irrigated through a variety of systems. North Africa is also a major exporter, especially fruits and vegetables that cannot be grown in European winters. However, their export values do not cover the value of imports: North African food trade balances are persistently negative (Tanchum 2021).
Map of North Africa. Source: Peter Fitzgerald, CC BY-SA 3.0, <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
Mainstream narratives, including World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and FAO publications, and Western media outlets, explain the origins of these deficits by referencing chronic water shortages, unproductive agriculture and severe Saharan soils; an environmental determinism that cannot account for these quantitative indicators (Nin Pratt et al. 2018 ; FAO 2015b; 2017; World Bank 2013; 2016; 2017a; 2020a; 2021; IFAD 2011). For behind quantity lies quality: with North Africa in a position of dependency in the world system, constantly haemorrhaging value, locked into a situation wherein the fruits of its labour and its land flow to the global North due to a structural relationship of subordination. Such subordination is the fruit of history: the result of the northern monopoly capitalism which produced the climate crisis to begin with. We explain this process below, focusing on the post-colonial period when agrarian dynamics and the international context briefly opened then closed the path to a different future, opening the path then to the present, marked by persistent rural poverty, under-consumption or malnutrition, massive external debt, tremendous differentiation in rural landownership, persistent import/export imbalances, and extraverted agrarian systems. These components systematically interrelate. Furthermore, food exports are not necessarily a direct indicator of dependent insertion into the world food system. Rather, during some of these periods, North African countries’ subjection was marked by generally positive agricultural export/import balances and rural immiseration, the outcome of exploitation and lack of internal articulation. Commodity-export orientation in this context is a manifestation of underdevelopment.
North African history can be divided into a series of overlapping periods: colonisation (1830–1962); decolonisation, post-colonial developmentalism and agrarian reform (1956–1980); state-directed capitalist development (1969–1991); and neoliberalism under the shadow of war (1986–present). Each country’s agrarian history is specific, but broad trends are visible. Furthermore, national agrarian histories are regional and global – shifts in rural relations of production intertwining with food import-export balances unfolded within broader political architectures. They were also shaped by the faltering restoration of national productive forces to the nation and often the nation’s poor: Egyptian effective decolonisation and Libya’s 1952 decolonisation were preconditions for Tunisian political decolonisation, given their roles as arms corridors and rear bases. Tunisian national independence enabled Algerian decolonisation as Tunisia was a rear base, although the separate negotiation of independence blocked a more radical regional independence. The countries in North Africa are partially an economic unit given their ‘vertical’ historical relationships with the French colonial empire. Even more so, they share a political history interwoven by materiel flows and ideological currents. These include shared technologies, popular pressures for agrarian redistribution and new relations of production including cooperatives, an overemphasis on capital-intensive large-scale hydraulics, and integration into the international financial system.2
Colonisation
Colonialism rests on a suppression of popular classes’ purchasing power, a necessary concomitant of diverting productive resources and the profits gleaned from their sale to the metropole and its domestic accomplices (Patnaik and Patnaik 2021). Positive export balances went alongside mass poverty, especially in the countryside. In Egypt, large amounts of land were under cotton even as per capita cereal consumption was low and, through 1952, decreasing. Algeria exported wine and wheat to metropolitan France, while per capita cereal consumption was below human needs. Similarly, Tunisia exported hard and soft wheat alongside wine and olive oil under colonialism, while famine became endemic in its countryside. Such ‘primitive’ accumulation was the basis of accelerated Western industrial accumulation, tied to the climate crisis and broader ecological crisis. It provoked, in turn, Arab and North African national liberation struggles (’Abd Allah 1976; Toubal 1979).
The period of post-colonial development reflected a wide combination of social and political forces. Decolonisation included associated demands for an extension of political sovereignty to the economic realm. The Cold War created space and the political rational whereby development became normative (Moyo and Yeros 2005, 20–22), yet Euro–US monopoly capital counter-insurgency policies drove states away from nationally popular projects based on shattering colonial agrarian heritage and moving towards sovereign industrialisation. This was a common thread throughout the post-colonial period (Ajl 2019). US wheat exports became structural to constraining the development projects of newly independent states, including creating a structure of possibilities wherein such nations would opt for industrial-biased development policies. This occurred alongside worldwide pressure towards the national suppression of cereal prices, further shifting policies away from food self-sufficiency (Wallenstein 1976; Wallerstein 1980). At this time, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt (1952–1970) enjoyed strong state control of agrarian production, often but not always with important pro-peasant changes in land ownership or land tenure relations (Saad 1998). In the most radical of these experiments, cooperatives bloomed countrywide. This ‘Bandung’ moment in the Arab region saw its twilight as the US–Israel attack on the frontline states in the 1967 war delegitimised radical pro-poor nationalism, and anti-systemic leaderships which had sought to combine internal redistribution with military confrontation, or pro-US republics and monarchies, helped to destroy the internal legitimacy of dirigisme.3
By the 1970s, as state developmentalism turned from national capitalism with pro-poor tendencies and ambiguous orientations towards pro-peasant reforms, cereal import dependency became structural. Import-substitution industrialisation gave way to export-oriented industrialisation, a global pattern of accumulation and the basis of what became offshored emissions and neo-colonial profit-making for northern capital. Agricultural policies shifted towards medium and large farmers (Bush 1999; Ikram 1980; Hansen 1991). Agrarian reform stopped, except in Libya. States moved to a dual-pronged approach: stabilisation, subsidies and loan packages for medium and large-scale capitalist farming, often with an export orientation. Within the cereal sector, states aimed to partially replicate the Indian or Mexican ‘Green Revolution’, focusing on increased imported mechanisation, fertilisers and pesticides (Ajl and Sharma 2022; Dumont 1971). This led to gradual differentiation alongside increased absolute numbers of farmers and land fragmentation via inheritance. Smaller farms received less state support yet had their social reproduction largely assured through a combination of subsistence, remittances for ecologically unsustainable technological ‘upgrading’, and circular migration patterns. Yields mostly remained low on smaller farms while increasing on larger farms.
Alongside this pattern in the cereal sectors, North African states began to shift more of their irrigable or fertile lands to fruit and vegetable production (Perennes 1993). Annual domestic per capita fruit and vegetable consumption generally increased, reflecting that this period did not yet see systematic suppression of capacity to demand. As part of this process, North African states invested heavily in capital-intensive hydraulics – irrigation infrastructure (Ayeb and Bush 2019; Ayeb 2009). Spurning any potential interest in small-scale techniques, states diverted up to 50% of their agricultural budgets in large dams (Fernandes 2014). Much of these investments floated back to the global North as the materials and expertise were unavailable in North Africa. Such policies were extremely costly, locking in long-term debt and contributing to northern finance and capital’s structural power over these post-colonial projects (El-Amami 1983).
The last period was marked by neoliberalism and war, and the parallel decline in developmentalism. Labour shares of value decreased on a world scale, and particularly in the Arab region, through a global regime of pro-capital policies labelled ‘neoliberalism.’ Rising absolute quantities of cereal and food imports and deteriorating macroeconomic balances went alongside increased capitalisation of North African agriculture and mounting, if obscured, poverty. Politically, there was the dismantling of state–populist developmental compacts. Developmental policies lost legitimacy, driven by rising repression of the left and the mounting discrediting – and later, fall – of the USSR as an external political pole. Finally, the 1990–1991 war on Iraq was a critical lever in shifting Egypt away from its remaining state-developmental policies and towards the radical opening-up of its agrarian system to global laws of value. Internally, the rising class power of the export-oriented agrarian bourgeoisie and the ever-widening ‘opening’ of markets further subtended the drastic reorientation of state agrarian policies (Radwan and Lee 1986; Faris and Khan 1993).
Throughout North Africa, a set of policies were put in place leading to rising rural poverty and dependence on food imports. Land rent limits and tenure protection were dismantled in Egypt in 1992; Algeria shrunk its state-owned sector, in some cases opening up land for private purchase; Tunisia increasingly shifted its remaining state-owned experimental farms to private renters. Input subsidies were reduced regionally, a process of ‘betting on the strong’, and domestic price fixing led to ever-increasing convergence between domestic prices and world market prices, a bane for producers. Throughout this period, rural poverty became endemic, reaching close to 100% of the rural population in Egypt, and rising rapidly and disproportionately in Tunisia and Morocco.
The crisis
Against this background, we interpret the ecological crisis as part of a broader crisis of social reproduction. The waste product of monopoly capital, CO2, creates the basis for a problem – widespread climate change – which then passes through the prism of domestic neo-colonialism which monopoly capital itself helped create. The region is now described as a ‘climate change hotspot’ (IPCC 2021; Tull 2020), with temperature increases causing extreme heatwaves highly likely. The region is ‘more sensitive to the factors driving climate change than most other areas of the world’ (Scott 2021; Gouda 2020). These include extreme heat, deserts and dust, particularly in the central regions of Algeria and Libya. The Tindouf Basin, an area south of the Little Atlas in Morocco extending west and south to Western Sahara and east to Algeria, is dependent upon more than 90% of available water for agriculture. This makes livelihoods particularly vulnerable under the current distribution of resources unless there are strong adaptive capacity measures (ESCWA 2017, 43; Abumoghli and Goncalves 2021). There may be a 7 degree centigrade increase in temperature before the end of the twenty-first century; a 2 degree centigrade rise would lead to a 20% to 40% precipitation decrease.
The intensification of heatwaves has an impact on people’s health, livestock sustainability, agricultural production, water availability and energy supply (Zittis et al. 2021). The World Bank suggests increased water scarcity will lower growth by 6–14% by 2050, with poorer, ‘more agriculturally based economies suffering more’ (World Bank 2016). These consequences have an impact on labour supply, employment opportunities, migration and political protest as governments struggle to meet the local aspirations of young unemployed and underemployed people. In response to the projected climate emergency, the World Bank has assembled a checklist for policymakers and a set of policy recommendations on disaster risk management (World Bank 2012, 158–159; 2022).
The dominant narrative in much of the literature from policymakers, governments and academics asserts that North Africa has a highly vulnerable agricultural sector which is directly or indirectly fed by rainfall in more than 50% of its cultivable area (World Bank 2020b). This might be direct rainfall or irrigation with rainwater dams and surface water. Agriculture is also a dominant employer. Projected heat extremes will worsen already deteriorating rural livelihoods that have been undermined by economic liberalisation and policy neglect of small farmers. Increasing food and water demands from a steadily rising population, under existing economic and political conditions, will contribute to an increase in migration, mostly internal, leading to shifts in populations, increased urban squalor, unemployment and political discontent, creating a stagnant reserve army of labour (Waha et al. 2017).
There is high variance in adaptive capacity within North Africa and vulnerability to climate change that is linked to patterns of land use. The projections for the highest temperature rises are close to the Mediterranean coast, but also inland Algeria, Libya and large parts of Egypt. In these areas, a 2 degree centigrade global warming will lead to regional warming by 3 degrees centigrade. These temperature rises will aggravate water shortages that are seen to limit national food self-sufficiency. A drier climate is projected to shift vegetation and agricultural zones northwards by 75 kilometres by 2090–2099 relative to 2000–2009 in a world where there is 4 degree centigrade warming. Warming is likely to reduce the growing season for wheat (Ferrise et al. 2013) and crop yields may fall by 30% with a 1.5 to 2 degree centigrade warming. These are only projections. It is nevertheless stark that the region has a high prevalence of undernourishment and food insecurity.
The snapshot provided by Table 1 highlights a regional human crisis, and given data collection is notoriously poor it is likely that these are underestimates. The FAO notes a series of Malthusian ‘challenges’, summarised as rising demand and diminishing resources (Smulders et al. 2013). Youth unemployment in the region is the highest in the world, perhaps as high as 25%, and higher still after Western intervention in Libya. Furthermore, unemployment is suppressed by a brain drain and unskilled economic migration from North Africa to Europe. Only 28% of women in North Africa are active in the labour market, but this figure fails to capture the extent of women’s work, the changing nature of what a labour market may look like, and the pluriactivity of women who are active in local agricultural production, domestic labour and casual on- and off-farm employment. There is thus a rising burden of overall social reproduction on women amid the undermining of the natural conditions for that labour (Ossome and Naidu 2021). The impact of Covid-19 is still being calibrated. Pressures on the resource base are repeatedly noted by IFIs, which frame North Africa as a region of water and land shortages, and biodiversity crises.
Prevalence of people affected by food insecurity in North Africa, 2014/16–2017/19 (%).
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Notes: n.a. = not available. Reliable data for other countries are not available nor are there estimates for missing countries.
Source: FAO FAOSTAT 2020.
Land and family farming
Agriculture in the region is shaped by family farming and its persistence highlights two enduring features of rural (under)development: the importance of access to land and the overwhelming evidence that poverty is greatest in non-urban settings. The two themes are linked, and debates relating to family farming and land use have sought to address these issues. However, much of that debate has been conducted without reference to the farmers who farm, families and households that divide their labour between social reproduction in the village and community and those who work for wages off farm, nor to the fact that poverty and unequal access to land are political and historical processes.
Family farming includes all family-based agricultural activities that are:
a means of organising agricultural, forestry, fisheries, pastoral and aquaculture production which is managed and operated by a family and predominantly reliant on family labor, including both women’s and men’s. The family and the farm are linked, co-evolve and combine economic, environmental, social and cultural functions. (FAO 2013, 5)
The most important feature of family farming is the relationship between size of the agricultural holding and the family. Table 2 indicates that most landholdings are small, and IFIs see this as an impediment to increasing productivity. However, while the size and quality of landholding is crucial to rural livelihoods, rural poverty is not absolute or immutable. It is the product of historical underdevelopment, local class relations, the deleterious conditions under which regional economies have been unevenly inserted into the world economy, and the preference given in rural development policy to larger landowners and the production of export-oriented crops. Although there have been some examples, at least rhetorically, of the need to improve the well-being of family farmers – in Algeria, or Egypt between 1952 and 1967 – the broad policy, especially after 1967, has been to favour large-scale local and international landowners rather than develop locally sensitive agricultural policy to boost the rural incomes of the poorest households with and without land (World Bank 2013; 2017a). This policy is accelerated by imperialist interventions, as in 1967, which severely damaged the legitimacy of redistributionist policies in the region. It is the fruit of political engineering, not merely market processes.
Number and area of farms by land size class, 1990, 2000 or 2010 percentage.
| Land size class | Total | < 5 ha (%) | 5–10 ha (%) | 10–20 ha (%) | 20–50 ha (%) | 50–100 ha (%) | >100 ha (%) | >50 ha (%) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Algeria (2001) | Holdings | 1,023,799 | 57.81 | 17.71 | 13.97 | 8.61 | 1.40 | 0.52 | 1.91 |
| Agricultural area | 8,458,680 | 11.29 | 14.19 | 22.42 | 29.38 | 11.00 | 11.71 | 22.72 | |
| Libya (1987) | Holdings | 175,528 | 49.43 | 23.02 | 16.11 | 9.11 | 0.22 | 0.39 | 0.61 |
| Agricultural area | 2,495,906 | 7.72 | 12.14 | 17.00 | 22.42 | 1.18 | 39.54 | 40.72 | |
| Morocco (1996) | Holdings | 1,496,349 | 71.13 | 16.56 | 8.36 | 3.21 | 0.52 | 0.21 | 0.74 |
| Agricultural area | 8,732,223 | 23.89 | 21.70 | 21.53 | 17.48 | 6.70 | 8.70 | 15.40 | |
| Tunisia* (2004) | Holdings | 516,000 | 54.46 | 21.12 | 13.84 | 7.89 | 1.94 | 0.78 | 2.71 |
| Agricultural area | 5,271,000 | 10.55 | 14.36 | 18.29 | 23.07 | 12.35 | 21.38 | 33.73 | |
| Egypt (2010) | Holdings | 4,439,532 | 96.97 | 2.57 | 0.27 | 0.12 | 0.03 | 0.04 | 0.07 |
| Agricultural area | 4,086,927 | 61.51 | 17.25 | 4.42 | 3.41 | 2.13 | 11.29 | 13.41 |
Source: Adapted from Lowder, Sánchez, and Bertini 2019, 52.
Notes: * Tunisia was not included in the original table. Figures added from data of the Tunisian Ministry of Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources (MARH).
Progress for North Africa, and especially rural development, is mostly seen as a process of modernisation or a failure to modernise due to local obstacles (Hatzbany 2020; World Bank 2021a; 2021b). It is not seen as obstructed by policies reflecting the interests of monopoly capital. Those interests, for example, have tried to interrupt land redistribution on a world scale, by sanctioning countries like Zimbabwe that have run against the grain to implement agrarian reform (Moyo and Yeros 2007). Thus issues of land use and the impact of climate change are seen by governments and IFIs through the prism of local farmer resilience, adaptation and mitigation, not global struggles over property relations (UNDP 2017; Wehrey and Fawal 2022). The emphasis is placed on the farmer and their ability to respond to change, without much appreciation of what it is that farmers and farming households do. Modernisation, in IFI literature and policymaker reports, is judged by the degree to which small-scale family farming can be scaled up, land fragmentation reduced and landholdings enlarged by market incentives, privatisation of land tenure, and the development of food security. Food security is defined as the ability of countries to access sufficient income to purchase food on international markets. Production for local need is rarely emphasised, despite the evidence that small-scale family producers are the bedrock upon which food is produced:
Worldwide, farms of less than 2 hectares account for approximately 84 percent of all farms and operate about 12 percent of all agricultural land. To make a rough estimate of the share of food produced by farms smaller than 2 hectares, or small farms, for each country (out of a sample of 112 countries), we multiplied the share of land operated by these farms by the value of food production in 2015. We then looked at the sum across countries to obtain the worldwide average (weighted by the value of food production), which points to roughly 36 percent of the world’s food being produced by small farms. (Lowder, Sánchez, and Bertini 2019, 13)
In Tunisia, where olive cultivation is important, food products and livestock play an important role in family farms (Ayeb and Bush 2019, 93–121; Fetoui et al. 2021). In Morocco, three-quarters of the agricultural land is devoted to cereals (durum wheat, soft wheat, and barley), vegetables (lentils, chickpeas, beans, etc.) and small livestock (Davis 2008). Fruit plantations and mixed farming associated with small livestock dominate in all the Atlas regions. Elsewhere, on the irrigated plains land, in valleys or oases, cropping systems combine food products (cereals, fruits, vegetables) and products oriented towards exports (citrus fruits, early fruits, dates).
In Egypt, with a high degree of intensification of small-scale family farming, there is a contrast between the agricultural area covered by these farmers and their contribution to production. Small farmers cover about 35% of the country's total agricultural area, yet ‘their contribution to production is about 47% of the national production of field crops (cereals), 61.3% of large ruminant production, 59.3% of small ruminant production, and a smaller proportion of horticultural crop production’ (Marzin 2016, 44). Widespread irrigation in Egypt creates the possibility for many farmers to benefit from three annual growing seasons.
Except for Egypt, five hectares per farm on irrigated land, and 10 hectares for rainfed agriculture, is the minimum size needed for a peasant family to ensure its own food security and the bulk of its income. This is a statistical average: reducible to two or three hectares in irrigated areas, like oases, or increased in arid regions without access to irrigation water. In Egypt, where almost all agriculture is under irrigation, this threshold can be set at two hectares (equivalent to approximately five feddans – one feddan equals 0.42 hectares). A farm of 100 hectares (50 hectares in Egypt) is already a large capitalist farm, whether organised and run by a family or not (Ayeb and Bush 2019, 123–148).
The number of farmers with fewer than five hectares and their share of the total agricultural area in each country highlights the inequalities in access to agricultural land: in Algeria, they constitute 57.81% of all farmers but have only 11.29% of the total agricultural land; in Morocco, the ratio is 71.13% and 23.89%; in Tunisia, 54.46% and 10.55%; and in Libya, 49.43% and 7.72%. For Egypt, Table 2 shows a ratio of 96.97% and 61.51%, but these figures may be misleading. A more realistic comparison would be to consider the threshold as two hectares, which gives 91.76% and 47.03%. There is a clear correlation between access to agricultural land and theoretical poverty level.
In the case of owners of more than 50 hectares, the ratios are even more telling: 1.91% of all owners own 22.72% of the country’s agricultural land in Algeria; 0.61% and 40.72% in Libya; 0.74 and 16.4% in Morocco (the age of the census – from 1996 – puts these figures in some doubt); 2.71 and 33.73 in Tunisia; and 0.07% and 13.41% for Egypt (here too, the threshold could have been set at 30 hectares or more).
The extent of inequalities highlighted in Table 2 should promote debate about the need for redistributive land reform and reforms in land tenure and credit allocation to limit the negative effects of large-scale and industrial agriculture. Yet policymakers are silent in their agreement that land redistribution is not on the political agenda. This muteness is at a time when pressures on family farming have reduced the total area available for small producers, while benefits accrue to large landholders who have mined soils, used water very inefficiently and extracted surpluses for non-agricultural producers (El Nour 2019; Henderson 2019; Bush 2007). There remains a failure by policymakers and IFIs to view land use and local smallholder responses to the climate emergency as an opportunity to valorise indigenous farming knowledge and techniques. That alternative policy frame would involve shifting measures to penalise investors and speculators who may take land and other resources away from food production for local use (El Nour 2019; Ahmed 2019). For family farming to be secured, and its social and economic worth understood, with all the consequences that can follow – namely, a slowing of rural–urban migration, as rural work can become more secure – agricultural extension needs to be orchestrated by family farmers themselves (Bush 2016; Van der Ploeg 2008; McMichael 2013) and rural labour revalued.
Small-scale family farming provides most food products for domestic markets (Marzin 2016; Marzin et al. 2016; Faysse et al. 2010). This includes urban, peri-urban and marginal areas. Moreover, small-scale family farming mainly exploits short supply chains, guaranteeing a better comparative advantage for direct sales or the supply of small-scale agri-food crafts.
In Morocco as in Tunisia, family farms supply fruit and vegetables to local rural souks, raw milk to collectors and dairy cooperatives, and contribute, through self-consumption (of wheat, potatoes, eggs, milk, meat, etc.) or by supplying domestic markets, to the food security of farming households and local populations. (Marzin 2016, 44)
North African farming systems significantly contribute to rural households providing for themselves. Family farmers acquire much of what is needed for farming from non-market activities that remain robust during the climate emergency and help protect rural households from the power dynamics of local markets. Markets tend to register what is marketed, not what is produced. Examining this issue in Morocco, Rignall (2021) estimated there can be as much as a one-third difference between what markets register compared with what is actually produced by family farmers (see also Raikes 1989). Mitchell (1998) noted similar in an Egyptian case, where fellahin (peasants) were not keen to report to officials what was actually produced. Substantial amounts of Tunisian olive oil do not enter the market. Households produce food for their own consumption, and provide food adapted to local tastes for often precarious urban households (Ayeb 2017). Middle- and upper-class urban households draw subsistence from familial farms, and hire super-exploited labour, often rural, to process those goods. We need to better understand the local dynamics of rural households, which are ignored in the dominant policy debates. Rural households sell food via local markets and it is crucial to understand ‘the interplay of intra-family and inter-generational solidarity that prevails within farming households (donations, collective meals)’. These play an ‘effective role in the fight against food vulnerability and the collective social precariousness of rural populations’ (Marzin 2016, 44; see also Van der Ploeg 2008).
IFI and government responses to crisis: climate policy without people
IFIs characterise North Africa’s agrarian crisis as one of the declining position of agriculture to the region’s economies, with the predominance of ‘lower value cereals with yields below world averages’. Sudan is viewed as unable to adapt to intensive irrigated agriculture, unlike Egypt, and there is a continuous lament regarding water scarcity (FAO 2015a; Verner et al. 2019. The FAO stresses the need for improved efficiency in water use and help for improved groundwater use, irrigation modernisation and water productivity in Tunisia and Morocco (FAO 2012; 2015b; ESCWA 2017). Recent work in Morocco, however, highlights how IFI and government data may overestimate the decline in agriculture’s contribution to GDP by at least 30% (Rignall 2021). Agriculture is persistently undervalued in its contribution to national accounting figures. Farmers are seen to be diversifying income sources as a response to the impact of climate change (FAO 2019) and IFIs’ mantra is that land use changes need to be mediated by adaptation and mitigation. Resilience and agrarian modernisation are seen to go hand in hand. Agrarian reform is off the agenda.
The World Bank and IFIs
There are several common themes in how IFIs and international organisations frame land use and the climate emergency. The most influential commentator on land use and climate change in North Africa is the World Bank, alongside USAID and the FAO. A central theme in each of these organisations, and especially underpinning World Bank policy reports, is a view of development and modernity in the global South that is urban, industrial, although powered by renewable rather than fossil fuels, and where the benefits of economic reform will trickle down to the poor if market liberalisation is promoted.
The World Bank asserts that climate change, poverty and inequality are the defining issues of our age (World Bank 2023), and each of these issues has been getting significantly worse over the last 40 years. Climate disasters since 1980 in the Arab region have affected 50 million people and cost more than US$11.5 billion, although what exactly these numbers refer to is unclear (Verner 2012, 100). Many factors have been driven by Western military intervention in Libya, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere.
The World Bank focuses on climate, agriculture and regional hydrology. These three issues help it frame why the region does not develop as quickly as it could, and how it might deploy mitigation and adaptation strategies to address crises. In doing so the World Bank has tended to generalise climate change indicators from econometric modelling. Crises linked to land use are viewed through the lens of promoting adaptation and mitigation strategies. Its evidence stresses that agricultural production is decreasing due to the climate emergency and climate change-induced environmental erosion, increased temperatures, and varied precipitation rates in the South Mediterranean. Other areas, such as the Nile Delta, will suffer from saline intrusion from the sea. The World Bank also focuses on water scarcity in North Africa and the implications of this on the agrarian and agri-food sectors.
It acknowledges that small-scale farmers are among the most vulnerable to climate change as they are the most dependent upon weather conditions and land access, and very often have little contact with support systems and safety nets. Yet the World Bank does little to address the absence of family farmers and their voices and experiences from the formulation of IFI and government policy recommendations for land use. When they are referred to, family farmers are seen as an undifferentiated mass, and a potential hindrance or block to modernity, rather than the essential foundation upon which a development strategy can be promoted. The exceptions are when rural women and youth may be presented as a possible future market that is currently untapped. This emerges in Morocco’s Green Generation Strategy (Asharq A-Awsat 2020).
The World Bank uses the language of mitigation and adaptation to address land use change and climate emergency (World Bank 2013). It encourages the building of resilience by regional states, improved knowledge, and advocacy highlighting the dangers of climate change and the need to develop early warning systems (Verner 2012; Verner et al. 2019). Policy recommendations for building climate resilience almost unanimously advocate for adaptation efforts, but most recent climate funds have been tailored toward mitigation projects (e.g. renewables). The World Bank dominates the appraisals of climate change, land use and agriculture. There is little consideration for small farmers’ difficulties in accessing finance and it sees climate resilience and agrarian modernisation as proceeding hand in hand. For Morocco and Egypt, this means recommending restructuring agri-food systems (World Bank 2017b). For Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco, irrigation modernisation is presented as the panacea for climate change-induced water scarcity and to boost agricultural production (World Bank 2017b). The policymaking environment is highly politicised in all cases. In Sudan, adaptation funding is often merged with ‘peace and security’ projects. Regionally, World Bank and government reforms fail to address specific local issues. Instead they promote generalised policy to accelerate agricultural modernisation irrespective of country-specific analysis. While many policy initiatives have not been assessed as to whether they have met their declared outcomes, we note a policy continuity: the marginalisation of small-scale family farmers. This occurs amid trying to convert traditional farming systems to modernised intensive agriculture – which requires larger-scale, more wealthy landowners, renters and developers (World Bank 2017b; 2020c). The World Bank and national governments justify this by declaring the importance of food security, poverty reduction and improved rural livelihoods (FAO 2021).
Bringing farmers back
The social and economic crises experienced by peasants in North Africa are not only due to the climate emergency. They are the result of the agricultural policies, first colonial and then liberal and neoliberal, followed by states after formal political independence, and the world-scale effort to avert economic sovereignty, in particular through land-to-the-tiller China-style agrarian reform (Ajl n.d.; Cullather 2010). North African peasants have felt the consequences of state policy and how national economies have been unevenly integrated into the world food system – producing to export and importing to feed.
The policy based on the international market, with the rhetoric of promoting food security, creates a permanent obligation to seek foreign currency that is only possible through increasing exports. The consequences of these choices are multiple and aggravate the conditions and relations of production: 1) a concentration of land that automatically dispossesses small owners; 2) an acceleration of the fragmentation of small farms, which is both the result and the cause of the impoverishment of the peasantry; 3) a greater ‘contribution’ to the climate emergency and the destruction of biodiversity. Thus, before exploring the capacity of small-scale producers to ‘adapt’ to the climate emergency, it is necessary to start by deconstructing the evolution of their social and economic conditions over recent decades. This helps to better understand the causes and origins of their current situations and the neo-colonial undermining of the fight for national liberation. This is a necessary step in an effective battle against the climate emergency, which must take the national question as its frame (Moyo, Jha, and Yeros 2013). For if historical analysis leads to the conclusion that certain outcomes rest on diminishing small-scale farmer well-being, avoidance of agrarian reform, and export-oriented and functionally dualist agricultural development within the context of social counter-insurgency, it would follow that different policies ought to be advocated.
The period since the mid 1980s has seen neoliberal dominance intercut with imperial warfare, shaped by structural adjustment programmes that have transformed regional farmers, dispossessing many from smallholdings, raising input prices to unaffordable levels and promoting the growth of largely cash crops for export, rather than staple food crops for local consumption. Private sector-led growth has empowered large (and some small) entrepreneurs who have charged increased prices for essential farming inputs, accelerating social differentiation as smallholders and near-landless people have been displaced. Yet private-sector growth has been the mantra of IFIs, especially the World Bank and USAID, as the mechanism to improve agricultural productivity and regularise land use (Bush 2016, 13).
Policymakers’ responses to the disabling impact of adjustment programmes have tended to be reform, with the handwave that a sharp shock was necessary and if agricultural growth remained slow, it was because of poor policy implementation and local farmer resistance. There was also much celebration of local farmer resilience and coping mechanisms in times of hardship. Such celebration was misplaced. There may be much to applaud in the coping and survival strategies of family farmers, including changes to cropping and seed mixes, adjusting the planting calendar as rainfall appears late or is disrupted compared to previous years, promoting access to off-farm income, travelling further to reach different markets, moderating diet, and so on. Yet these strategies have different impacts on farmers with different land size and resource access, on women compared to men, and on young compared to elderly people. Moreover, ‘adaptability’ does little or nothing to reverse or counter the reasons why usually poorer family farmers are the first to experience crises and why crises intensify rural poverty. Adaptability at best seems a strategy to take farmers back to pre-crisis levels of social organisation and production. Yet this is precisely the condition from which it was difficult to avoid entry into crisis. And if the strategy is to accelerate rural social differentiation, quickened by climate change, failures in urban economic growth mean that urban decay advances, with at best petty commodity production for the dispossessed as they seek to eke out an existence in urban squalor.
Economic reform and reconfiguring land use
There have been more than 35 years of economic reform in North Africa where private-sector reform and privatisation of land tenure and markets have been promoted (World Bank 2008; 2012; USAID 1999). Such was the dominance of Washington-driven policy reform in the 1990s that several floors in the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation were occupied by USAID. The policy ethos in Egypt and elsewhere was for private-sector growth, privatisation of land tenure and conversion of state land to private property that was then appropriated by local, often non-farming elites or foreign investors (Bush 2002).
The neoliberal period has generated the (re)politicisation of land and processes of primitive accumulation throughout North Africa, amid the militarised evaporation of the developmental achievements of the Arab republics (Kadri 2014). The starkest example of trying to reconfigure land use for the private sector was probably in Egypt, a country from which many others seem to learn the benefits but not the deleterious consequences of the reconfiguration of land use (Fautras and Iocco 2019) notably, a policy which emerged after the assault on Iraq. The pattern of decline for the agricultural sector in general and small farmers in particular can be traced to the last 50 years of government policy throughout North Africa. Policy has failed to promote either food security or export-led growth that could have generated revenue for development more generally. The promotion of what has been called ‘reckless free trade’ has failed to raise rural living standards because:
headline structural problems remain: deficits in production and productivity; trade deficits; insufficient and inadequate funding; infrastructure deficiencies; omnipotence of weather hazards; limited natural resources in constant degradation; archaic and counterproductive land tenure structures; weak farming systems poorly coordinated with the rest of the economy; poverty and widespread illiteracy; and an even more onerous food import dependency. (Akesbi 2014, 169)
The climate emergency and family farming
The climate emergency exacerbates the destructive cycles of long droughts and devastating floods. Many reports converge on the same conclusion: the direct (droughts and floods) and indirect impacts (social, economic and ecological) will affect the populations of countries of the global South, which lack the means to protect themselves, more than those of the global North, which produce and emit most of the carbon dioxide in the air:
In developed countries which emit excessive amounts of greenhouse gases, the impacts of climate change will however not be felt as severely, due to policy and infrastructure systems that are better equipped to cope with climate change impacts. (Laukkonen et al. 2009, 289)
To ensure a solid and sustainable food security for countries and farmers, it is important to set agricultural policy in terms of food sovereignty and self-reliant development. The former is becoming an important entry point for the debate about the changes in land use due to climate change. Food sovereignty is the freedom of a people to produce food in the best possible conditions, considering its habits in relation to consumption, sustainability, quality, and the necessary protection of its environment, biodiversity and natural resources (Ayeb 2012, 10). Self-reliance refers to overall macroeconomic and planning architecture. It is also crucial to note that as manual work is becoming less attractive to young rural people, it is women who seem to be paying the price and bearing a heavier workload. Together with an increase in female labour time with farm work there is a pattern of land fragmentation that may relate to factors such as inheritance laws, collectivisation and consolidation processes, plot size and shape, as well as the link between farm holdings and market access. Land fragmentation is a preoccupation among IFIs. It may pose real issues of concern for planners but the bigger issue that needs to be addressed is the inequality in landholdings and their concentration for the benefit of large owners (Ayeb and Bush, 2019, 119–120). Fragmentation of agricultural land is primarily the product of poverty, dispossession and exclusion of the small peasantry and small landowners, and lack of an appropriate self-reliant, popular-based national development project.
Conclusion
This article has surveyed a range of IFI policy proposals to address the climate emergency in North Africa. We have stressed how IFI policies have systematically ignored and marginalised small-scale farmers, and that climate policy is likely to intensify their impoverishment (see also Clapp, Newell, and Brent et al 2018). We noted several dimensions to the climate emergency and the emphasis that especially the World Bank has given to policies of mitigation and adaptability that is reinforcing historic trends of liberal development policy. In contrast to IFIs, we have argued for the importance of understanding the uneven integration of the region into global capitalism, the evolution of smallholder incorporation in the social compact through state policies, and the policy effects on land tenure, marginalisation and well-being. We have outlined a regional political landscape of imperial war and state fragmentation, which has opened a wider scope for IFI interventions in agrarian production and reproduction, and accelerated smallholder marginalisation and vulnerability. We have critiqued widespread environmental determinism and the logic of market-based, governance, or merely technocratic interventions in the rural sector.
We propose instead that food sovereignty within the framework of a national sovereign project is critical in order to address questions of widespread agrarian inequality and smallholder marginalisation, to provide an appropriate macroeconomic and political structure for developing smallholder resilience and adaptation capacity, and to lean on them as the pillar of a popular project for the countries of North Africa. Such a national sovereign project is necessarily self-reliant (which does not mean autarkic). It would rest on valorising rural, semi-proletarian and urban working-class incomes while mobilising a surplus for sovereign and ecologically modulated industrialisation (Amin 1983). Such a process would in turn require a selective, ecologically and socially appropriate mode of industrialisation, including heavy industrialisation, yet without surrendering to ‘catch-up’ models, and adopting and adapting new and old technologies (Abdallah 1980). Such a development model – popular in the region until the late 1980s counter-revolution swept across the planning and intellectual world – retains programmatic relevance for the twenty-first century.