The social life of wheat and grapes: domestic land-grabbing as accumulation by dispossession in rural Egypt

Yasmine Moataz Ahmed

Review of African Political Economy, 2020, vol. 46, issue 162, 567-581

Abstract: In the last three decades, Egypt’s rural population has experienced different types of struggle over land as a result of neoliberal land reforms, which have favoured landowners and marginalised tenants’ interests. While the literature highlighted the negative effects on the tenants, little attention was given to what landlords did with the land after the reforms. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2013 in five Egyptian villages, the article addresses this lacuna by investigating tenants’ understanding of land-use change. Using a revised conceptualisation of Marx’s metabolic rift, the article shows that evicted tenants understand this shift as part of a domestic land grab that disrupted the ecological system. The article therefore conceptualises land dispossession and domestic land grabs as mutually reinforcing processes and draws particular attention to the sensorial dimensions associated with domestic land grab, in addition to the political and economic dimensions.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03056244.2019.1688486 (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:567-581

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

DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2019.1688486

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 ().