Press Association/AP/Amr Nabil. All rights reserved.The mass protests that erupted against the Mubarak regime in 2011 and subsequent events have primarily been an urban affair, with the locus of events around Cairo and other urban centres.
Rural Egypt, where 57% of the Egyptian population currently reside, has been eerily quiet. Even though there were instances of protest and attempts at organisation, such as the establishment of the independent farmer’s union in 2012, the emergence of a radical agrarian movement that could offer meaningful resistance did not transpire, even though the lot of small farmers has been in decline for decades.
This process of decline reached its nadir in 1992 with the issuance of Law 96, which effectively reversed one of the most important laws of the Nasserist period, the land reform law. Under this law the rent of land, which was fixed at seven times the value of land tax, was liberalized. Farmer’s rights to extend rental contracts in perpetuity were revoked, allowing landlords to expel their tenants at will. This led to a return of a pattern of land ownership that had not been seen in Egypt since the days of the monarchy; for example, 0.05% of landlords came to control 11% of agricultural lands. This law affected one million households in the Egyptian countryside, who at the time were estimated to represent 10% of the population.
