Ray Bush

The accumulation of dispossession

Eleven years ago, this journal published a special issue on ‘The Struggle for Land’ in Africa (volume 27, issue 84, June 2000). Its focus was on struggles over access to land and land rights, probing the relationship between town and country and how land and agricultural strategies are shaped by political power. It also looked at how different struggles over land helped shape the ways in which African states were unevenly incorporated into a world economy shaped by imperialist intervention. At first glance it seems that the processes of underdevelopment identified in that issue are being repeated in the contemporary period: the World Bank and other international financial institutions remain heavily fixated on promoting individual and privatised land tenure. People’s rights to access and the more general rights that rural Africans seek to promote remain central issues of contested politics and class struggle, whilst recurrent food insecurity propels a rationale for liberalised markets to promote entrepreneurial initiative, in the vain hope that this will produce improved well-being. Yet contemporary debate about land in Africa and about land ‘grabbing’ suggests that all these processes have recently intensified. Driven by dispossession, rural protest and urban food riots, the centrality of land and struggles over access to it and how it is to be worked and owned are once again at the fore of political debate and policy-making interventions. The issues of 10 years ago are not simply being repeated, albeit this time on a greater scale. There is now a qualitative difference in the ways in which land and land transformation are shaping Africa’s political economy. One of the most important distinguishing features of contemporary debate about land in Africa is indeed the scale of recent dispossession. Accuracy in figures to account for what exactly is happening in relation to land transfers and foreign capital intervention is elusive. This is a point made well in this volume by Hall who problematises, among other things, the language used to describe land transfers and the purposes to which the land is eventually used. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) estimates, for example, that between 15 million and 20 million hectares in developing countries changed hands between 2006 and 2009. And it seems that the assumption underpinning the stance of international financial institutions and transnational companies, not only in the North, but also from the Global South, is that Africa has a lot of land that is simply idle – and what better purpose for available liquidity than to facilitate access to land? Land can be used as a hedge against crisis-ridden international financial markets; it allows for investment in agricultural production, usually of high-value luxury (low nutritious) food or horticultural products for export, or for the production of biofuels at a time when global energy prices have been at an unprecedented high. The myriad set of reasons for accessing African land link the continent immediately into the vagaries of the international market and provide evidence for accumulation of international capital on the back of African land, livelihoods and resources. Thus one of the most recently contentious land deals has involved South African farmers accessing 172,000 of the 10 million hectares of land that the government of Republic of Congo

Politics, power and poverty: twenty years of agricultural reform and market liberalisation in Egypt

Abstract This article examines the character of economic liberalisation in Egypts countryside. It focuses on the impact that reform has had on historic struggles for rights and security for Egypts fellahin. The erosion of rights, the hiking of land prices and the failure to promote rural development that embraces the knowledge, skills and expertise of Egypts smallholders is an indictment of Mubaraks five terms as president: it will leave a heritage of a subordinated agrarian capitalism shaped by attempts to further incorporate Egypt into the world system.

Scrambling to the Bottom? Mining, Resources & Underdevelopment

The 21st century race for resources and territory has simultaneously induced cries of optimism from donors and the international agencies, but there is despair from critics and many on the continent: that plunder and looting continues in a manner reminiscent of the colonial past (Bond, 2006; Bush, 2007). But is the current scramble similar to the previous looting of African resources? Are there no benefits from the demand for Africa’s resources? Can the current dynamic be characterised as a scramble or, is it simply ‘business as usual’ for the good of civil society?

Adjustment in Egypt? The Political Economy of Reform

This article examines the nature of structural adjustment in Egypt. It situates the policies of the International Financial Institutions within the context of Egypts economic and political crisis and the efficacy of their policies of liberalisation in agriculture and for economic growth. The IFIs are promoting policies for rolling back the state but they are not addressing issues of ‘good governance’ and democratisation. It is tempting to conclude that the current international strategy for economic reform is a repeat of the failed policies twenty years ago of Anwar Sadats infitah.

Coalitions for Dispossession and Networks of Resistance? Land, Politics and Agrarian Reform in Egypt

This contribution examines the ways in which land is politicised in Egypt. It argues that it is part of a broader process of accumulation by dispossession in the Middle East. Agricultural reform in Egypt has promoted the interests of a particular political coalition of the erstwhile ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). Dispossession has also, however, led to the emergence of political networks of resistance. They are fluid in their composition and they challenge the continuation of agrarian reform that has historically marginalised smallholder farmers. One of the many challenges for post-revolutionary Egypt will be to ensure the development of an inclusive strategy for rural development and an agrarian reform programme that safeguards smallholder interests.

An agricultural strategy without farmers: Egypt's countryside in the New Millennium

This article argues that Egypts countryside is at a turning point. The economic reforms have not delivered the intended improvements in production and yet there is little indication that the Government of Egypt (GoE) will manage to work with the IFIs to promote an alternative economic adjustment. The reforms began in Egypts agricultural sector in the mid‐1980s and were eventually matched in 1991 by an economic reform and structural adjustment programme (ERSAP) and a renewed programme with the IFIs in 1996. Macro‐economic targets set by the IFIs have helped stabilise the economy, reduce government expenditure, inflation and budget deficits although large scale privatisation of state assets have failed to emerge and so too has significant economic growth (Pfeifer, 1999; Mitchell, 1999). Attention has particularly focused on price and marketing reforms in agriculture, on the slashing of subsidies and on the promotion of cash crops for export. Land reform, favouring landowners and marginalising tenant interests, has also been central to agricultural transformation. Sustained and diverse economic growth has eluded Egypts economy. Unemployment remains a central problem exacerbated by the economic reforms as levels of rural and urban poverty have also risen.

Zimbabwe out in the cold

Acute food insecurity has returned to much of Africa in its acutest form – famine – or is it simply that it never went away because western eyes have focussed too much on the consequences of 9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the continuing US and Iraqi fatalities that blind commentators to Africa’s continuing poverty? A food crisis seems most acute in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan where people are at risk from death resulting from illness, malnutrition and hunger. Ethiopia’s longest drought in living memory has led to higher than normal incidences of preventable illness like measles and malaria and economic collapse in the Horn, and more generally the failure to promote sustainable economic growth elsewhere in Africa makes immediate famine prevention, recovery and long term resistance to its recurrence seemingly impossible.

The Politics of Food and Starvation

This article evaluates the persistence of famine and hunger in Africa. It assesses Africas food crisis and traces some of the key debates on famine and starvation since the 1970s. It examines the continuity and change in those debates and argues that many of the recent insights into the ways in which food systems may become vulnerable to famine can be provided by an assessment of the political struggles involved in agricultural modernisation.

Egypt: a permanent revolution?

Finally, and only after being pushed hard by permanent demonstrations, Egypt’s generals caved in to pressure for serious constitutional reforms as a first step towards the possibility of democratic deepening. Yet the recent overwhelming support for proposed constitutional amendments – 77.2% voted for proposed amendments in March – has not settled fears of counter-revolution or a return to office of erstwhile ruling National Democratic Party cronies. The constitutional amendments limit presidential terms to two each of four years, in contrast to the previously unlimited number of six-year terms. And it will be easier to mount a challenge to run for presidency. However, opponents to the amendments, from the left, Nasserists, youth coalitions and Copts, have argued that they are premature and that the 1971 Constitution should have been abandoned and entirely replaced. The possible continued presence of members of the old regime raises concerns about just how serious the military is in ridding the country of the economic elite that has destroyed Egyptian livelihoods for the last 30 years. These fears intensified at the end of February as the Egyptian interim cabinet approved a decree-law criminalising strikes, protests and demonstrations, including sit-ins that ‘interrupt private or state-owned business or affect the economy in any way’. After such an historic revolution, this may not be the time to be curmudgeonly. Attending the biggest party I have ever been to in Midan Tahrir in March was exhilarating and joyful, full with expectation and real hope. It has been more than 20 years since I began visiting and studying Egypt’s political economy. I have often made annual pilgrimages to Cairo’s wonderfully vibrant, yet repressive and challenging city, and I have witnessed attempts to transform the countryside by destroying benefits Nasser gave to tenants and other smallholders, as the NDP decided instead to return land to landowning allies. Many of the landed elites were in the corrupt parliament, so voting for rural (dis)possession was easy. If tenants have been impoverished, then nouveau riche, mostly young and assertive investors have taken advantage of cheap (and corrupt) land ‘sales’, free water for high-value and low-nutritional foodstuffs for export rather than the promotion of local food security. The destruction of Egypt’s environment by agribusiness stripping the country’s valuable top-soils became de rigueur. Yet these processes, among many others, have been contradictory in their outcomes. After most of my

Commentary: taking leave of the twentieth century

A year ago, in ROAPE 60, we observed that the debt crisis provoked a deep pessimism about the prospects for African economic development in the immediate future. While the development process has been characterised historically by alternating waves of optimism and pessimism, the enormity of debt servitude and the ideology of debt management which structured the approach of the international financial institutions made the present conjuncture particularly disquieting. The brief hopes, encouraged by the events of 1989, that the end of the cold war would turn swords into ploughshares, end arms races and shift resources to growth, development and environmental protection have proved unfounded. Instead, US hegemony and the politics of markets have imposed further austerity on the poor and the weak and heightened local, national and global inequalities.