Uprisings without Agrarian Questions

Abstract

This chapter explores a series of issues that seem to have been ignored in the many debates about Egypt’s post-25 January uprising and the toppling of dictator Hosni Mubarak.¹ I want to ask why it is that Egypt’s small farmers have been ignored or abjected (cast out) of debates about Egypt’s economic and political future. And I want to mention some of the reasons for this in the context of what elsewhere have been called agrarian questions (Bernstein, 2004, 2006). These questions relate broadly to issues of accumulation, production and politics. Does agriculture in Egypt have the capacity to generate food and non-food output that exceeds an amount necessary for self-provisioning, and, if it does, what obstacles prevent this potential being realised? And what policy would be needed to ensure a more equal distribution and consumption of food in Egypt, where more than 30 per cent of Egyptian children are stunted because of dietary constraints yet 35 per cent of adults are obese (FAO, 2013, p. 23). To what extent has capitalist production become generalised in rural Egypt? Is there widespread wage labour, or (just) the expansion of market activities and dispossession of opportunistic landlords and smallholder pre-capitalist farmers, who may block increases in productivity, restrict accumulation, and operate on the basis of patron-client relations and non-market imperatives? And at the level of politics, have large-scale peasant movements, independently or in class alliance with workers and other social forces, promoted policies for social justice and economic transformation (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2010, pp. 255–256; Bernstein, 2010)?