Samuel Cohn: Global Social Trends

We don’t hear much about protest in the Egyptian countryside. Why the silence? The American mass media generally limits its coverage of the Middle East to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iran, and the petroleum politics of Saudi Arabia. Events that don’t have an immediate short-term implication for the United States and Europe get lighted, and events in peaceful countries get lighted. Egypt has recently been a stable place – so Western journalism turns its attention elsewhere.

However, protests in the Global South demand attention. Protests are a precondition for regime change. They also represent the seeds of what can turn into enduring conflict and civil war. They also provide revealing portraits of life in these countries that are different both from simple stereotypes of widespread poverty that come from accounts by social workers and missionaries, and the self-interested representations by local businesspeople who provide glowing accounts of the riches that can be obtained by investing in their country. Life is neither as horrible nor as wonderful as the standard accounts would suggest.

Note that what is happening to Egypt is happening globally. I chose to write this essay about Egypt – but I could have just as easily picked about seventy other countries. Those seventy other essays would have laid out a parallel version of this story. Egypt has its quirks. But the Egyptian story is a theme for which there are many variations.

Egypt has a non-trivial history of rural protests and small farmer resistance. One can find an excellent history of these protests in Ray Bush’s first rate article in the 2023 Journal of Agrarian Change “Land and Small Farmer Resistance in Authoritarian Egypt.” Other countries would send you to other articles. Those articles exist.

Let’s discuss Egypt and Ray Bush’s analysis. I start with some back story to put Ray Bush’s account into perspective:

Egypt has historically been one of the world’s largest producers of cotton. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, only the American South and India have produced more. Until Egypt discovered its oil and gas reserves, exporting cotton was a primary strength of the Egyptian economy. Egypt’s other main strength was trade. Even before the Suez Canal was built, most of the trade between Europe and both Africa and Asia went through Egypt – going down the Nile River and across East Africa to the Indian Ocean.

Being a world-class producer of cotton did not make most Egyptian farmers wealthy. Social inequality has always been massive in Egypt. The overwhelming majority of farmers tried to scrape out a living on very small farms; most of the land was controlled by a small set of giant landholders with political connections. The Ottoman Empire taxed Egypt heavily. Egypt in turn taxed its farming population, privileging large landlords and laying heavy burdens on small farmers. British control of Egypt did not improve the situation. The British favored large farms that could increase the export of Egyptian cotton to British textile factories. Small holders were marginalized, while collaborators with the British were favored with even greater access to land.

Over time, land inequality has generally gotten worse in Egypt. In 1929, 42% of Egypt’s farmers had 5 acres or less, and only 1.3% of the farmers had a farm of 50 acres or more. In 2010, nearly 92% of Egypt’s farmers had 5 acres or less, while a scant 0.2% had farms of 50 acres of more. The percentage of farmers with very small farms doubled between 1929 and 2010; the percentage of farmers with large farms in 2010 was less than 1/6 of what it had been in 1929.

There was one period in which circumstances significantly improved for small farmers. Between 1954 and 1970, Egypt had a socialist president: Gamal Abdul Nasser. Nasser instituted a major land reform, seizing the estates of the royal family and foreign landowners and redistributing them to poor farmers. Rents were reduced dramatically. Maximum limits were placed on the size of landholdings. Government assistance was provided for agricultural credit, seed, fertilizer and irrigation. But, there were limits on what Nasser could accomplish. By the end of his regime, only about 1/7 of Egypt’s arable land had been redistributed.

Since then, however, virtually every other Egyptian president has worked to essentially undo the Nasser reforms. Land has been concentrated in a small number of holdings. Government supports for poor farmers have been reduced or eliminated. Rents have been allowed to increase dramatically. Some of this has been done for the sake of agricultural efficiency. Large farms can sometimes afford better technology than can small farms, making them more productive for the economy as a whole. Cutting government supports for poor farmers was done in the name of facilitating the repayment of foreign debt and producing a more market-oriented economy.

Regardless of whether the post-Nasser reforms were good or bad for the Egyptian economy as a whole, they were bad news for small farmers. Between 1970 and the present day, virtually every new Egyptian regime has promoted the elimination of small farms, and the increased concentration of land holdings. They have reduced small farmers’ access to water, seeds and capital. In more recent periods, there has been additional destruction of small farms in order to promote urbanization and non-agricultural real estate development. Farmers have sometimes had to make common cause with urban dwellers whose homes or apartment buildings were threatened by gentrification or commercial construction projects.

What could farmers do about this? The Egyptian state is generally authoritarian and intolerant of social protest. Egyptian farmers would not have been allowed to stage the major national protests that characterize a country like France. French farmers routinely block highways, dump produce in public places and hold massive rallies to oppose agricultural policies they don’t like. But there is nevertheless a continuous undercurrent of rural protest in Egypt combined with a few spectacular national-level manifestations.

One such wave occurred between 2009 and 2010. There were 499 deaths, 2517 injuries and 3020 arrests that resulted from multiple small-scale farmer resistances to rent increases, dispossession or access to water. Sometimes the protest involved nothing more than holding a public meeting. The 2009-2010 period saw the holding of 200 formal agricultural conferences oriented to discussing farmer defense. There were campaigns to send telegrams to the president. Farmers would hang black flags on rooftops. They would block highways or railroads.

The 2010’s saw nationwide protests from a wide variety of social groups that eventually overthrew newly-elected President Morsi. Farmers participated in a rural-urban petition campaign that generated 15 million signatures calling for Morsi’s resignation. Between 2011 and 2013, there were over 7000 protests against Morsi – although the majority of these were probably organized by city dwellers. During the same period, and extending into the late 2010’s, there was a long string of protests over bad water provision and bad roads. Water is essential for both drinking and for agriculture. Bad roads are a salient issue for farmers because they increase the difficulty of bringing crops to market in a timely manner. Road blockages are a common response to both water and transportation problems. Some of the road blockages are actually successful. Water protests tend to occur in waves. There were 85 water protests between 2011 and 2015. In 2018, there was another wave of 165 different water protests.

However, the most important wave was in the years leading up to 2011. Levels of both rural and urban protest were high – so high that they led to the resignation of President Mubarak. Farmer protests were supported by urban NGO’s and other solidarity groups. The largest such group, the Peasant Solidarity Committee, was an organization of radicals and intellectuals with an interest in rural affairs. The 2011 protests were marked by land occupations. Land occupations were generally short; the government crushed such gestures quickly with the conspicuous use of force. Landless rural workers went out on strike.

There was a further wave of protests in 2019. Street demonstrations played a conspicuous role in this case. The protests were repressed – but concessions were won, regardless. Most notably the government restored subsidies for food for both rural and urban populations that were about to be cut as part of a debt repayment program.

Getting a clean count on the number or size of Egyptian protests is difficult. In the case of England and France, systematic measurement of the size or frequency of protests would not occur until the 1970’s. Government statistics on these matters are often spotty – with far more attention paid to protests in capital cities and less to comparable events in remote villages. Usually, time has to pass to allow particular disputes to become desensitized – allowing both former authorities and former protesters to speak candidly about what actually occurred.

However, even with imperfect knowledge, it is clear that Egypt – and for that matter other poor countries as well – have significant levels of protest. This is true despite high levels of policing and an absence of guarantees of human rights. These protests often have an economic base. They are not so much about poverty per se, as they are about attempts to take things away from poor people – be it land, water, housing or government services. Mobilization is defensive. Mobilization is centered on immediate economic issues.

What is the general pattern that Egypt is illustrating?

Throughout the world, economic growth is occurring, sometimes in a benevolent way, sometimes in a less benevolent way. A common strategy is what is known as rural proletarianization. Small farmers lose their land. Large farmers gain the land. The large farmers do well. The small farmers not so much. Sometimes the large farmers get everything they want and that is all there is to it. Sometimes the small farmers decide to do something about it.

Those “somethings” can be the major events of world history.