Experts say agriculture could be key to restoring Egypt's economy

For decades Egypt’s economy was guided by political forces who wanted to enjoy the fruits of western capitalist democracy without sowing the seeds for the local economy to flourish on its own. Those forces looked to remittances, tourism or the Suez Canal for revenue, but ignored agriculture, an important part of Egypt's GDP with its roots firmly planted in the country's own backyard.

Egypt’s historically powerful agriculture sector has been in serious decline over the past 30 years, but still comprised 13.7 percent of GDP in 2010, according to statistics from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), despite what many critics say is a lack of attention.

“A country’s agricultural sector is a vital characteristic of its strength as it symbolizes a nation’s ability to sustain life,” said Shaban Salem, an economist from Egypt’s Agricultural Economics Research Institute (AERI).

“It symbolizes independence through self-sustainability and trading strength, as well as opening the doors to an employment sector that makes use of large populations, with the effect of wealth trickling up, rather than trickling down,” Salem said.

During the 1980s in Egypt, however, Agriculture Minister Youssef Wali began aggressively putting into place the free-market policies initiated by former President Anwar Sadat.

“Though these policies were intended to liberalize the economy,” adds Salem. “ [But] they quickly widened the gaps between the rich and the poor, and import and local goods.”

This culminated in Law 96/1992, which granted landowners, whose land was seized and redistributed by former President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the incontestable right to reclaim it despite the fact that millions of ordinary Egyptians farmers had invested in and built their lives on the land since 1952.

Often the reclamation happened by brute force, resulting in hundreds of rural deaths and thousands of injuries annually. Millions of cases of dispossession occurred in favor of non-agricultural investments on arable land, according to Egypt's Land Center for Human Rights (LCHR). The most recent case of last dispossession occurred last May, when approximately 3000 families living on 40,000 feddans (168 square kilometers) in Madinat al-Sadat were displaced for the purpose of non-agricultural, private investment.

These policies have contributed to Egypt’s steadily declining agricultural sector

Additionally, large food subsidies and unfair trading systems has forced many farmers to re-prioritize their output in less efficient ways, which, according to Adel Beshai, a professor of agricultural economics at The American University in Cairo, is a major factor of smaller harvests. Once a key Egyptian crop, the output of cotton dropped over 75 percent from 1972 to 2009, according to the FAO Production Yearbook.

Spokespersons for the Agriculture and Land Reclamation says that agriculture remains a low priority because “only 3 percent of Egypt’s approximately 1,000,000 square meters of land is arable, therefore agriculture is naturally a declining industry in Egypt.”

Agriculture experts, however, say that percentage has hardly changed since 1972. Moreover, large arable parts of the Delta remain uncultivated while other parts do not get used to maximum capacity due to the lack of farmers’ education and lack of governmental assistance. According to FAO statistics, the land that is arable is extremely rich and could potentially, if properly cultivated, allow for two to three harvests per year of high quality crops, rather than the one to two it does now.