The social life of wheat and grapes: domestic land-grabbing as accumulation by dispossession in rural Egypt

ABSTRACT

In the last three decades, Egypt’s rural population has experienced different types of struggle over land as a result of neoliberal land reforms, which have favoured landowners and marginalised tenants’ interests. While the literature highlighted the negative effects on the tenants, little attention was given to what landlords did with the land after the reforms. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2013 in five Egyptian villages, the article addresses this lacuna by investigating tenants’ understanding of land-use change. Using a revised conceptualisation of Marx’s metabolic rift, the article shows that evicted tenants understand this shift as part of a domestic land grab that disrupted the ecological system. The article therefore conceptualises land dispossession and domestic land grabs as mutually reinforcing processes and draws particular attention to the sensorial dimensions associated with domestic land grab, in addition to the political and economic dimensions.

RÉSUMÉ

Dû aux réformes agraires néolibérales qui ont privilégié les propriétaires terriens et marginalisé les intérêts des travailleurs paysans, la population rurale égyptienne a expérimenté différents types de lutte au cours des trois dernières décennies. Tandis que la littérature a souligné les effets négatifs pour les travailleurs paysans, peu d’attention a été portée sur ce que les propriétaires terriens ont fait de la terre suite aux réformes. S’appuyant sur des enquêtes de terrain conduites entre 2011 et 2013 dans cinq villages égyptiens, cet article s’attaque à cette lacune en se focalisant sur la compréhension des travailleurs paysans quant aux changements dans l’utilisation de la terre. Utilisant une conceptualisation révisée de la rupture métabolique de Marx, cet article montre que les travailleurs paysans expropriés comprennent ce changement comme étant part d’un accaparement des terres domestiques qui a bouleversé le système écologique. Ainsi, cet article conceptualise l’expropriation terrienne et l’accaparement des terres domestiques comme des processus qui se renforcent mutuellement, et tire particulièrement l’attention vers les dimensions sensorielles associées à l’accaparement des terres domestiques, en plus des dimensions politiques et économiques.

KEYWORDS:

• Land dispossession
• rural Egypt
• domestic land-grabbing
• crops
• metabolic rift
• political ecology

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Expropriation terrienne
• Egypte rurale
• accaparement des terres domestiques
• cultures
• rupture métabolique
• écologie politique

Acknowledgements

Early drafts of this paper were made possible through the support of the postdoctoral fellowship programme (Cycle 2) of the Arab Council of the Social Sciences with funding from the International Development Research Center (IDRC). I would like to thank Reem Saad for her mentorship throughout my fellowship and for introducing me more than a decade ago to the engaged work on rural Egypt. Development of the drafts were possible with the invitation of Mathilde Fautras and Giulio Iocco to a workshop titled ‘The Land Question in North Africa in an Era of Global Resource Grabs and Ecological Crisis’ in which this paper was presented and discussed. I am grateful to them for providing feedback along the submission and peer-review processes. I also thank the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, based in Berlin for hosting and financially supporting the workshop participants. My travel and stay in Berlin during the workshop was made possible through funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European research and innovation programme Horizon 2020 (grant agreement no. 695674), and from the promoting institutions of the ERC TARICA: the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Institute of Research on the Contemporary Maghreb (IRMC). I am extremely grateful to Raymond Bush, Elisa Greco, and my anonymous reviewers at the Review of African Political Economy for providing extensive feedback on this piece. I would like to thank Saker El Nour for his invaluable feedback on this paper and Sana Sherif for compiling an annotated bibliography that I needed to complete the final draft. The statements made and views expressed in this paper are solely my responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Yasmine Moataz Ahmed is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the Core Curriculum Office and the Anthropology Unit of the American University in Cairo. She earned her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, where she investigated everyday state–citizens encounters in rural Egypt, post-2011 uprisings.

Notes

1 To guarantee anonymity, the names of informants were all replaced by pseudonyms.

2 HEIA website: http://heiaegypt.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/HEIA-Presentation-English.pdf.