Grabbing from below: a study of land reclamation in Egypt

Saker El Nour

Review of African Political Economy, 2020, vol. 46, issue 162, 549-566

Abstract: The article questions state land commodification and the expansion of frontiers in land reclamation projects in Egypt. It does so by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the form of in-depth interviews and archival research on land tenure relations in Wadi Al-Nukra, Upper Egypt. In the article, actors and structure dynamics are situated in the wider political economy framework in order to guide both the data collection and the discussion surrounding the results. The key finding was that agricultural development in the desert created a particular class formation and resulted in specific land concentration. It did not lead to the hegemony of agribusiness nor to the success of desert agriculture in solving agrarian questions or issues relating to food security and population redistribution. The coexistence of different legal frameworks, development policies and discourses concerning allocation of state land, all of these coming from different backgrounds, has led to the concentration of property and to cronyism. It also reveals a deepening social differentiation and class formation. The land reclamation project in desert areas is increasingly moving towards an acceleration of the commodification of state land used for production, accumulation and speculation.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03056244.2019.1755190 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:revape:v:46:y:2020:i:162:p:549-566

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CREA20

DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2019.1755190

Access Statistics for this article

Review of African Political Economy is currently edited by Graham Harrison, Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Claire Mercer, Nicolas Pons-Vignon, Aurelia Segatti and Ray Bush

More articles in Review of African Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().