Food, States, And Peasants

Analyses Of The Agrarian Question In The Middle East

Alan Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429711817
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Studi regionali

One of the most serious problems facing the Middle East and North Africa · is the region's growing inability to feed its expanding population. Rapidly escalating demand has made the region highly dependent on food imports, and policy initiatives intended to increase domestic production have met with mixed success at best. The contributors to this volume examine the historical origins of state policies toward agriculture, recent policy changes and their effects on domestic supply, and the social and political implications of these shifts. Focusing on the region's largest agricultural economies, contributors analyze Turkey's strong performance as well as Egypt's weak response to its agricultural problems. Pricing, investment strategies, irrigation policies, and the impact of large-scale labor migration on agricultural sectors are discussed, and a common theme of the interplay between politics and economics runs throughout.

1
Introduction

Alan Richards

DOI: 10.4324/9780429035623-1

THE ISSUES

The issues underlying the papers in this volume are both scholarly and practical. From an academic perspective, three intersecting issues stand out 1) the choice of levels of analysis, 2) the dynamics of the differentiation of the peasantry, and 3) the role of state policy in that process and for agricultural development more generally. The first question is really an implicit one: How best to integrate analysis at the international, the national, and the local levels? Nearly all students of the rural Third World would agree that some comprehension of each level is essential for a grasp of the dynamics of agricultural development, but the relative weights given to each level vary considerably from one scholar to the next. Few doubt the necessity of detailed knowledge of local economic and political relations, but their conceptual and practical independence from national and transnational forces is highly contentious. The importance of national policy and its relations with both international and local forces implicitly inform all discussions of agricultural development, whether scholarly or practical. But how autonomous national economic policies in less developed countries are from transnational forces has been intensely debated for several decades. The impact of the international economic conjuncture on national governments’ room for maneuver in constructing and implementing agricultural and industrial growth strategies is an especially salient question in the Middle East, where the problems of the largesse generated by a decade of oil wealth now suddenly give way to the problems of austerity during the “oil crunch”. The contributors to this volume focus primarily on the national level, but many also include a local perspective, an international context, or both.

Second, all contributors to this volume investigate how agricultural development affects different social actors and the ways in which these actors in turn can shape that same process. That is, all offer analysis of the dynamics of the differentiation of the peasantry in the region: they constitute contributions to the debate on the “agrarian question” in the Middle East. Understanding the dynamics of interaction among large farms, on the one hand, and small farmers and farm laborers on the other is crucial for understanding the dynamics of agricultural output growth, of employment creation, of the distribution of income and of migration patterns. Such issues, in their turn, dominate debate on the political economy of food and agriculture in the region.

Third, all participants address the question of the role of state policy in shaping the processes of agricultural development and peasant differentiation and the implications of the problems created by those processes for state action. The impact of policy on agriculture is widely debated. At the risk of excessive generalization, workshop participants consider here two different “policy mixes”, one designed primarily to extract a surplus from agriculture (Egypt) and one constructed to support agricultural incomes and, therefore, domestic demand for industrial products (Turkey). The impact of policies on different peasant groups or rural social classes receives considerable attention, and the extent to which such groups in tum mould state policy undergoes careful scrutiny. In particular, the often debated issues of the “autonomy of state policy” or of state. actors looms large in several papers, and is implicitly treated (if in some cases to be rejected) in others.

The practical issues confronting Middle East agriculture and agri-cultural policy are straightforward--and stark. First, there is the overwhelming problem of “food security”. One of the most serious problems facing the Middle East and North Africa is the region’s growing inability to feed itself. The rising imbalance between consumption and domestic production constituted the Achilles heel of the oil boom of the 1970s. Rapidly escalating effective demand and sluggish domestic supply response have made the region the least food self-sufficient area of the world. Although there have been fears of politically motivated boycotts, the real problem has turned out to be economic: how to pay the enormous import bills? This trade problem is related to a second critical issue: how to finance the urban food subsidies which prevail in many countries of the region? Both are related to a final question: how to create sufficient employment for a rapidly growing labor force? This problem is especially acute in the cities, because of the “rural exodus”. The combination of increased food dependency, faltering trade balances, inadequate job creation, and continual rural-to-urban migration creates strong political pressures on the states of the region. The trade-offs facing policy makers are often grim; practical development workers face the unenviable task of trying to promote growth with equity in an environment of growing austerity.

Merely stating these practical problems immediately raises the issue of the interpenetration of levels of analysis. A common perspective is an “internationalist” one, in which the policies and outcomes in Third World countries are conceptualized as derivative of forces in the international political economy. Although there have been some useful recent additions to the study of the political economy of the Middle East which draw on the dependency approach or its cousin, the “world system’s” framework,[1] the theoretical and empirical problems of these perspectives which assert the dominance of transnational forces have been repeatedly emphasized. In particular, the absence of a persuasive theory of social change, the lack of attention to unintended outcomes, the downplaying of forces specific to a nation or locality; and the rather mechanical approach to underdevelopment and class formation have come in for especially heavy criticism.[2] The evident difficulties and weaknesses of this cluster of theories have led to renewed attention to the national and local levels, an attention which, however, is now better informed by an understanding of the need to locate such developments in their international context.[3]

This recasting of the questions of how to approach complex problems of agrarian political economy seems especially appropriate for the Middle East and North Africa. There is little doubt that the agrarian question in the region has been dominated for the past ten years by the Oil Price Revolution, and now, by the apparent counter-revolution of drastically lower real oil prices. The escalation of demand for food, the sluggishness of domestic supply response, the ability to finance food imports, and the accelerating rural exodus have all been linked directly or indirectly to the oil boom. Such international forces have also, however, stimulated widely different responses by different social actors: by states, by large and small farmers, and by farm workers. The analyses in this volume focus on the national and local levels without ever losing sight of the critical importance of external factors, such as the availability of export revenues or migration outlets.

THE DYNAMICS OF PEASANT DIFFERENTIATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST: POLARIZATION OR PEASANT SURVIVAL?

The second major scholarly issue raised in the volume is that of the differentiation of the peasantry. The vast literature on this world-wide topic may be divided into two broad arguments or “schools”. On the one hand, there are those who believe that the process of agricultural development, of growth of output and of technological change, are fundamentally polarizing. This perspective may be traced back to the Marxist classics of Kautsky and Lenin.[4] The argument posits, first, a relatively undifferentiated pre-capitalist rural social structure. Second, as capitalism penetrates agriculture, the population divides into five classes: landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, and landless workers. The origins of this schema were the direct empirical observations of the Russian and Chinese countryside by Lenin and Mao, respectively.[5] John Roemer has arrived at the same structure of classes by deductive logic, assuming only that actors maximize utility, that leisure is a normal good, and that land ownership alone differentiates peasants. In essence, the concentration of land ownership (assumed to be exogenous) combined with the emergence of markets for outputs and labor (or credit) in a previously undifferentiated community will generate these five classes.[6]

Most importantly, however, adherents to the classical Marxist position on peasant differentiation hold that this five class structure is unstable; the continued development of capitalism in agriculture will generate only two major rural classes: a class of large, capitalist farmers on the one hand, and a class of landless agricultural wage-workers on the other. Defenders of this theory usually argue that such a result is a long-run tendency, the outcome of a protracted process of capitalist development. In earlier stages of development more characteristic of today’s Third World, analysts working within this tradition typically employ the “five class scheme”.

The stress throughout is on land ownership: peasants are fundamentally differentiated by their varying access to land. However, access to other inputs and the form of labor market participation (i.e., whether the family hires labor or family members hire themselves out to others) are also central variables in such analysis. The argument assumes that the peasantry is relatively undifferentiated before the rise of private property in land and the commercialization of farming. But once the peasants are “linked” to product and labor markets the five classes emerge, as some gain and others lose from the simultaneous processes of the consolidation of property rights and the expansion of economic opportunities. More empirical analyses try to take into account the extensive “interlinking” of markets in the rural Third World, in which, for example, a poor peasant’s access to credit is tied to his willingness to work for a particular landlord at peak season.[7] Although such messy, intermediate cases are recognized, all analysts in this tradition argue that capitalist agrarian development tends to push most middle and poor peasants toward the bottom, while a few, lucky, relatively rich peasants will join the ranks of the agrarian capitalists or landlords. The mechanisms differ (default on loans, fragmentation through inheritance, outright seizure, distress sales of land, etc.), but the end result is held to be the same: polarization.

Examples of such a perspective abound in studies of the Middle East. For Egypt, perhaps the most prominent is the work of Mahmoud Abdel-Fadil.[8] Using data from the agricultural censuses of 1950 and 1960, he presented over ten years ago a detailed picture of the differentiation of the peasantry by land ownership, crop mix, and input use, especially of machinery and hired labor. As Aricanli notes (Chapter 2), discussions of the agrarian question in Turkey have been dominated by a similar perspective: the role of landlordism has attracted most attention. Similar work also exists on North African countries.[9]

Empirical evidence from many parts of the world suggests not only that in many eases the extent of differentiation has been exaggerated, but also that the “disappearance” of such intermediate groups as middle and poor peasants has been extremely protracted, at best. The second “school” on peasant differentiation is a loose collection of analysts going back at least to Chayanov[10] which argues the case for “peasant persistence”. Researchers such as Lewin and Kingston-Mann have shown that Lenin’s classical study of Russian agriculture, from which so many other analysts have drawn inspiration and a conceptual framework, greatly exaggerated the extent to which peasant differentiation had actually occurred there by the eve of World War 1.[11] Indeed, the agricultures of even the most advanced capitalist countries fail to conform to the model of polarization. Wage-labor is not the norm in the agriculture of such nations; despite exceptions, as in some unmechanized fruit and vegetable production, highly mechanized farms employing largely family labor, not vast “factories in the field”, are the norm. Similarly, in Turkey both Aricanli and Uner (Chapter 9) argue that small peasant farms continue to be the mode, while, as Adams stresses, in Egypi not only are small farms common (farms smaller than five feddans[12] cover more than one-half of Egypt’s farm area), but also small and landless peasants are bound by vertical linkages of loans and jobs to their wealthier neighbors. Uner notes the same kind of vertical linkages in his “transitional” villages.

A major theme of many of the papers which treat the issues of peasant differentiation is that of the “survival strategies” of small peasants. The need for local level analysis is especially strong here; only by detailed empirical studies can we learn much about how poor rural people manage to survive. Small farmers and landless agricultural workers have been able to improve their situation during the past decade in two major ways: 1) by renting in land and cropping intensively (a “commercialization strategy”), and/or 2) by emigration (an “exit strategy”).[13] In Egypt, for example, very small farmers produce the bulk of dairy and livestock products, whose demand is stimulated by growing incomes and whose supply is limited by government trade restrictions. By renting in small parcels of land and cropping them very intensively, they manage to obtain sufficient “food entitlements” and, in some cases, even some additional income.[14] Such a strategy also seems to have been available to small farmers in the better watered regions of Turkey.

However, such choices are not open to all small farmers: Adams (Chapter 6) presents evidence from Minya Govemorate where government regulations thwart such activity; Radwan also stresses these difficulties. And, of course, such “commercialization” strategies are closed to most of the landless.[15] Only an increase in rural real wages and employment can help them. Their situation improved during the oil boom, as higher paying jobs appeared either in construction in the major cities or in the oil exporting countries. There is clear evidence of an increase in rural real wages throughout the region during the 1970s, implying both a considerable outflow of labor stimulated by the oil boom and an improved food entitlement position for those agricultural laborers remaining behind. At the same time, the responses in cropping systems, land yields, and (so far) the pattern of mechanization seem to have increased the demand for agricultural labor. The shift to fruit and especially vegetables has raised the demand for labor in many cases; the need to rely on increased land yields for production increases also implies considerable potential for raising the demand for agricultural labor.

Increased incomes from the “commercialization strategy” and (probably more important but poorly documented) the flow of remittances into rural areas from ex-peasants working abroad have stimulated considerable construction activity and service employment in some rural areas of the region. A nation-wide survey in Egypt has shown that most small peasant households now obtain a majority of their income from non-agricultural sources.[16] Uner documents similar processes--and their problems--in rural Turkey. Radwan’s data indicate that the distribution of household expenditure became more equal in rural Egypt during the 1970s. Since land ownership was becoming less equal, improved employment opportunities (and perhaps gains from the “commercialization strategy”) presumably explain this phenomenon of greater equity. A combination of the two survival strategies open to small farmers seems to have belied the “polarization” perspective and to have confirmed the “peasant persistence” viewpoint.

However, “the game is hardly over”: there are reasons to doubt the long-run efficacy of either strategy, given the growth of population and the limitations on arable land inherent in regional geography. First, as Adams shows, some areas and many persons are left behind in this process; as Radwan ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• About the Book and Editor
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• History: States, Landlords, and Peasants
• The Political Economy of Supply: Taxes and Subsidies
• The Political Economy of Demand: Food Subsidies and Political Conflict
• The Transformation of the Agricultural Labor Force
• A Note on the Contributors