Deep Roots

[

] 24

Image: Issam Zerrok

Ms Rokaya, who is responsible for feeding the family, is planting in the high mountains of the Atlas

population also puts immense pressure on political leadership

for high expectations of development to be met.

The inflow of agricultural subsidized products from Israel has

also had adverse impacts on Palestinian family farmer competive-

ness. The World Bank notes that “Palestinian enterprises have

remained hostage to political instability, unresolved conflict, and

continued restrictions on movement, access, and trade.”

Economic reform and adjustment

The second major factor impacting family farming in NENA

has been the 35-year period of economic reform. Structural

adjustment programmes have transformed the region’s farmers,

dispossessing many from smallholdings, raising prices for

inputs to unaffordable levels and promoting export-led growth

of largely cash crops for export rather than of staple food crops

for consumption locally. Private sector-led growth has empow-

ered large (and some small) entrepreneurs who have charged

increased prices for essential farming inputs, accelerating rural

social differentiation as smallholders and the near-landless have

been displaced by those with larger landholdings and foreign

investors. Private sector growth has been the mantra of the

international financial institutions (IFIs)

and aid agencies and

its central plank has been land tenure reform: the conversion of

state land (and farms) into private property.

In the aftermath of colonialism, many governments tried to

break from the inherited bimodal agricultural system. State-

led agriculture and land reform across the region improved the

livelihoods of many family farmers and, as in the Egyptian case,

gave tenants the rights to land in perpetuity.

President Nasser

redistributed one-seventh of the country’s cultivable land from

large landowners to smallholders, tenants and some landless.

High oil prices in the 1970s, however, did not benefit small

farmers except to provide wage income for those who travelled to

the Gulf, Libya and Iraq to work. Investment in agriculture across

the Arabworld fell between the 1970s and 1990s. Privatization and

the sale of state farms accelerated, driven by donor and IFI pres-

sure. In Egypt, Law 96 of 1992 revoked Nasser’s legislation that

had given small farmers rights to lease land in perpetuity, and rents

rose for many families bymore than 400 per cent. Morocco’s green

plan (‘Le Plan Maroc Vert’) in 2008 promoted market-oriented

development to boost poor farmer income. However, it needs

strengthened consultation

as well as greater attention to the

complex and integrated pluriactivity of farming and farmers prior-

itizing food chains of fruit and vegetables, olives and olive oil.

Elsewhere, in the Maghreb, economic reform and structural

adjustment led to the deterioration of the material and social

conditions of small farmers.

In Algeria, prices of fertiliz-

ers and other agricultural inputs after liberalization increased

and their use fell: so too did agricultural output. Between

1983 and 1987, state-led land redistribution stopped, favour-

ing instead private entrepreneurs, and the previously termed

‘socialist agricultural domains’ were dissolved.

Climate change

Climate change and unequal distribution and access to water

is the third major constraint on family farming. Intrariparian

disputes over the use of water and muscular hydropolitics have

impacted on development concerns across borders.

The region

as a whole is a relatively low Co2 emitter, but many of its oil

producers have generated carbon-intensive lifestyles. In fact, per

capita emissions in many NENA countries are 60 per cent higher

than the average among developing countries,

while resource-

poor Yemen and Djibouti have some of the world’s highest levels

of poverty, as does resource-rich Sudan and South Sudan.

NENA may be the most water-scarce region in the world. Most

of the region’s water is used in agriculture.

High dependence

upon rain-fed agriculture makes family farmers, under existing

policy constraints, vulnerable to climate change. More than half of

egional

erspectives