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Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Tables and Illustrations -- List of Acronyms -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Introduction and Argument -- 2 The Origins of Egypt's Economic Crisis -- Nasser's Break with the Ancien Régime -- Sadat and Infitah -- The International Context -- Mubarak and the Economic Crisis of the 1980s -- Egypt's Recurrent Economic Crisis -- 3 Economic Reforms and Egyptian Agriculture -- Egypt's Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Programme, 1986-1998 -- Characterising the Agricultural Crisis -- Aims and Objectives of Economic Reform -- Economic Reforms-An Early Success? -- Economic Reforms-Still Not Successful Enough -- Conclusion -- 4 Agricultural Modernisation and the Egyptian Countryside: A Critique of Structural Adjustment -- Comparative Advantage and Tyranny of the Market -- The State and Agricultural Modernisation -- Government Neglect of Agriculture -- Understanding the Countryside -- Peasants, Politics, and the State -- The Critique: Bringing the Fellahin Back In -- 5 Views from the Village -- Kafr Tasfa and Kafr Saad -- Crisis in the Villages -- The Agrarian Reform Law -- Village and Environmental Transformations -- Women and Coping with Economic Reform -- Uniform Strategy Versus Socially Differentiated Villages -- 6 Egypt at a Turning Point -- Investing in Another Pyramid: The Politics of Tushka -- Rural Protest: The Politics of Law 96 of 1992 -- Agricultural Modernisation: An Alternative -- Egyptian Agriculture at a Turning Point -- References -- Index.

Framing poverty and neoliberalism: the Middle East and North Africa -- Commissioning Africa for globalization: Blair and the G8's project for the world's poor -- Labour across frontiers? Capitalism's struggle for profit and order -- Land, poverty and politics -- Wealth and poverty: mining and the curse of resources? -- Securing food and famine -- Resisting poverty and neoliberalism

ABSTRACTThis article explores the influences of the work of Lionel Cliffe in developing a radical rural political economy. A number of key themes in Cliffe's work are reviewed in order to explore how they have helped to shape a view of rural development that is based, amongst other things, on listening to farmers and exploring why both government policy and often radical interventions fail to deliver the promises of improvements to rural conditions of existence. Case studies from the Near East and North Africa (NENA) highlight absences in policy intervention particularly in the areas of conflict, environmental transformation and economic reform.

The United Nations International Year of Family Farming 2014 came at an important time for the region of the Near East and North Africa (NENA). This is because the political turmoil and uprisings that have structured politics and social policy in the region since 2010 (and as we will also see, from before this year too) demanded 'bread, freedom, social justice' (Aish, horreya, 'adala igtema'yyia). This slogan of protesters was heard in varied forms across the region. While most attention focused on urban rebellions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, where Western military intervention accelerated the removal from power of Muammar al-Gaddafi and the subsequent continued chaos, rural dissent and protest was also present across the region. Protests by small farmers across NENA had been very evident since the food price hikes of 2008 that had intensified rural malnutrition, poverty and inequality (Bush 2010). But the causes of protest had been long in the making and can be traced back to the onset of economic liberalisation in the mid-1980s, if not earlier. NENA is the world's largest food importer, relying on world markets for more than 50 per cent of its food. Price rises, particularly for wheat and rice, have given a stronger rationale to the strategic importance of boosting local production. The need to reduce the impact of the vagaries of volatile international markets for grain is - rhetorically at least - central to all countries in the region. Yet the strategy to reduce that dependence is shaped by intense local and international political pressures. The largely non-food-producing countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have intensified their search for land to purchase outside their national boundaries, while others, such as Egypt, have suggested the need to reinvigorate historical practices of land reclamation. All countries in the region are intent on increasing incentives to agribusiness investors. [.]