A view of the Nile in Luxor, Egypt.

By Rowan Dunlap

You may wonder how Egypt, a desert country with only 3.4 million hectares of cultivated land, can sustain its population of over 78 million. The answer is quite simple, it can’t.

If there is one thing I learned during my semester in Egypt, it’s that Egypt is a country of paradoxes. It is common to see a donkey cart rolling through the middle of downtown flanked on either side by brand a new Mercedes Benz, to see lonely bands of Bedouins roaming the desert and yet Cairo is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. The contrast between Egyptian past and Egyptian present is constantly on one’s mind. The state of agriculture falls into the same paradoxical dichotomy. One can take a high-speed train through the Nile Delta past fields laced with donkey paths and farmed with wooden hand tools but if one takes a train in the opposite direction, it is the Aswan High Dam that you find, an enormous technological project that drastically changed the face of agriculture in Egypt.

These contrasts help to illuminate a much larger issue. Egypt is a microcosm of many global issues that we face today. It is a desperately poor country with a proud past that was brought into the modern world through colonialism and military dictatorship. Its agricultural engine has been used to benefit external parties, rather than for the good of its people. Egypt has many real issues to face. The country cannot produce enough food to sustain its large and rapidly growing population. Instead of addressing these issues from a holistic perspective, current practices have been propped up by foreign aid and billions of dollars spent on technological fixes that only create more problems down the road. These efforts currently allow Egypt to supply itself independently with almost all agricultural commodities, excluding cereals, oils and sugar. Despite this impressive feat, with a population nearing 80 million in a desert country, Egypt still is one of the largest food importers in the world.

Not only is Egypt unable to sufficiently supply its population, what is produced domestically cannot be brought to the population through sustainable market mechanisms. The Egyptian population is heavily dependent on a generous government food subsidy system which has held the prices of baladi bread, wheat flour, sugar, and cooking oils nearly constant for over a quarter of a century. This policy so artificially deflates prices that it is said to be more cost effective to feed bread, a value added product, to chickens rather than raw grains. In an attempt to make this subsidy system more sustainable from a policy perspective, the Egyptian government has managed to bring total costs of the program down from 14% of government revenue in 1981 to 5.6% in 1997 but still spends over US$1 billion per year. Even with this expenditure, poor subsidy targeting leaves 14% of the poorest Egyptians with no assistance whatsoever.

To further heighten this crisis, Egypt is the recipient of massive amounts of foreign aid, much of which goes to domestic food assistance. Egypt is, in fact, the largest recipient of US aid in the Middle East after Israel. The food system in Egypt is thus not sustainable on any level. The land cannot produce enough food for the population, the population cannot afford to pay for unsubsidized food and the government cannot afford to subsidize food prices without external assistance. Without foreign aid and food imports, Egypt would starve.

This was not always the case. Egypt has a long, proud history of agricultural sustainability. In fact, there may be no place on earth that has been successfully cultivated for as long. For 5000 years Egypt sustained itself, through war and occupation at the hands of the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Turks, through devastating disease and internal upheaval.

This was in large part thanks to the self-sustaining basin irrigation system that watered the soil and replenished nutrients year after year. Each fall the Nile would flood its banks, covering the entire floodplain in 1.5 meters of water. By late November the water would recede, leaving behind thoroughly moist soil enriched by nutrient dense silt brought by the Nile from the Ethiopian highlands. This natural process was the foundation of basin irrigation. A series of regulated sluice boxes were used to direct the flow of floodwaters into basins built into the land by farmers. The water would rest in the basin for a month’s time until the soil was well watered before being drained into another basin.

This system was locally regulated, leaving it immune to the various upheavals of the central government. Egyptians still had to worry about the occasional shallow flood that could easily lead to a famine, but for the most part this system was sustainable. It is said that Egyptians’ reliance on the Nile and its vagaries encouraged a profound connection to nature.

This system, in tune with the natural cycle of the Nile and nourishing to the soil and the people of Egypt, has been abandoned in the modern era after 5000 years of success. A 20-fold increase in its population in the last 200 years has forced Egypt to leave behind this harmonious connection with the land and turn to artificially regulated irrigation, disrupting the renewing cycle of the floodwaters. The Nile has been dammed at Aswan, eliminating the annual flood, taking with it farmers’ natural source of water and nutrients. The agriculture industry is now completely dependent on the state for perpetuation and oil-based fertilizers for fertility. This system is not sustainable in the long term, however. As Egypt grapples with these issues, we can only hope that technology and sustainability will find a common ground before it’s too late.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Speak. Both comments and pings are currently closed.