North Africa: the climate emergency and family farming

ABSTRACT

This article examines recent international financial institution and national government policy in North Africa intended to address the climate emergency. It focuses on the role of the World Bank and general policy trends since the 1970s. These policy trends fail to understand the continuing centrality of small-scale family farming to social reproduction and food production. The article stresses the significance of historical patterns of underdevelopment, and the uneven incorporation of North Africa into global capitalism. An understanding of the longue durée is crucial in understanding why, and how, agrarian transformations have taken the form that they have, and why national sovereign projects and popular struggles offer an alternative strategy to counter imperialism and neo-colonialism. International financial institutions’ preoccupation with policies of mitigation and adaptation to climate change fails to address how poverty is generated and reproduced.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article examine les récentes politiques des institutions financières internationales et des gouvernements nationaux en Afrique du Nord visant à répondre à l’urgence climatique. Il se concentre sur le rôle de la Banque mondiale et sur les tendances politiques depuis les années 1970. Il s’agit d’une politique qui ne comprend pas le rôle central que continue de jouer l’agriculture familiale à petite échelle dans la reproduction sociale et la production alimentaire. L’article souligne l’importance des tendances historiques de sous-développement et l’intégration inégale de l’Afrique du Nord dans le capitalisme mondial. Une compréhension de la longue durée est cruciale pour comprendre pourquoi et comment les transformations agraires ont pris la forme qu’elles ont prise et pourquoi les projets souverains nationaux et les luttes populaires offrent une stratégie alternative pour contrer l’impérialisme et le néocolonialisme. La préoccupation des institutions financières internationales pour les politiques d’atténuation et d’adaptation au changement climatique ne tient pas compte de la manière dont la pauvreté est générée et reproduite.

KEYWORDS:

• Political ecology
• climate
• agrarian question
• small-scale farmers
• World Bank
• North Africa

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Écologie politique
• climat
• question agraire
• agriculteurs à petite échelle
• Banque Mondiale
• Afrique du Nord

Acknowledgements

The work in this article was made possible with support from the Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crisis (SPARC) Programme funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) of the United Kingdom. The contents are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the FCDO. Thanks to Dhouha Djerbi and Aymen Amayed for their help with research and data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We find the methodology of Watts (2013) useful here in taking climate change as an opportunity to bring the entire structure of the society under scrutiny.

2 The following account draws from Ajl (2021).

3 The Bandung conference in Indonesia on 18–24 April 1955 was a meeting of 29 Asian and African governments that debated, among other things, the importance of political self-determination, sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of especially the newly independent decolonised states.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Max Ajl

Max Ajl is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Conflict and Development Studies, University of Ghent, and an editor at Agrarian South and Journal of Labor and Society. He has written for the Journal of Peasant Studies, Globalizations, Review of African Political Economy and Middle East Report. He researches climate politics, Tunisian national liberation, agrarian politics in the Arab region, and Arab intellectual history. He is the author of A people’s green new deal (2021).

Habib Ayeb

Habib Ayeb is a geographer and Professor Emeritus at Paris 8 University in Saint-Denis, France. His current research focuses on agrarian, food, ecological and climate issues. He is co-founder of the Observatoire de la Souveraineté Alimentaire et de l’Environnement (OSAE) in Tunisia. He is also a film-maker and is currently directing a documentary on climate change and its impact on the environment.

Ray Bush

Ray Bush is Professor Emeritus at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on the political economy of Africa and the Near East and is an editor of Review of African Political Economy.