SINDIYUN, Egypt — Egyptian smallholders grow
nearly half of the country’s crops, a lifeline role increasingly important
after grain imports were stalled by war in
Ukraine — but they are struggling to
survive.
اضافة اعلان
Despite their crucial role providing food for the
North African nation’s 103 million people, smallholders are cash-strapped and
indebted, frequently selling their harvests at a loss.
“The farmer is dead, trampled,” farmer Zakaria Aboueldahab told AFP, brewing tea on his rented plot of wheat and onions in
Qalyubia, 30km north of Cairo.
“I’m trying to sell my onion harvest but I can’t
find a market,” he said, the remnants of his crop scattered across the soil. “I
just want to break even. I don’t know how I’m going to pay rent”.
His onions would sell in Egypt: but financing,
marketing, and infrastructure hurdles create massive gaps between supply and
demand.
According to the
UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), small farms are the “primary producers” of food for
domestic consumption in Egypt.
Farmers cultivating less than 3 feddans (1.2
hectares) — an area the size of a football pitch — till 35 percent of arable
land.
Yet they produce some 47 percent of Egypt’s field
crops, the FAO calculates.
Larger farms focus more on exports — a dynamic that
came to a head when Russia invaded Ukraine.
‘Patriotic duty’
Egypt, the world’s leading importer of wheat, relied on Russia and Ukraine
for 80 percent of its imports, providing the flour for Egypt’s traditional flat
bread.
Ordinary Egyptians
eat bread at almost every meal, and Egypt’s wheat farmers ramped up production
to 40 percent of the country’s needs.
“Without the 40
percent of wheat that we produce domestically,” rural sociologist Saker Al-Nour
told AFP, the consequences of the war “would be much worse”.
In March, Cairo
ordered farmers to grow wheat, calling the “compulsory delivery” orders a
“patriotic duty”.
By June, farmers
had provided more than 3.5 million tonnes, according to the supply ministry,
over half the domestic supply goal to August, and equal to the total amount
supplied in 2021.
Compulsory crop
deliveries were a pillar of president Jamal Abdel Nasser’s socialist policies
in the 1960s, but those policies were dropped amid the structural adjustment
programs of the 1990s.
With them went the
former subsidies on seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers which have steadily
shrunk over the decades.
“Instantly, when things got tough, it went back to
compulsory delivery, but this time without the services that came with it,”
Nour said.
To encourage
farmers to grow wheat, the government had previously set domestic prices higher
than imports.
But the
unprecedented surge in global prices undermined that.
Stronger together?
“Now I owe money to the pesticide guy, to the fertilizer guy,” Aboueldahab
said. “So if someone comes along and bids a low price, what am I supposed to
do?”
One solution is for
smallholders to join together and harness the power of technology.
Entrepreneur
Hussein Abou Bakr launched a start-up finance company called Mozare3, “farmer”
in Arabic, which offers farmers financing solutions and agronomy support.
It also helps
farmers “become a bloc”, in the absence of effective local cooperatives and
sets prices “as a form of protection” against market fluctuations.
Nour warns
smallholders have “very limited negotiating power, especially when they don’t
have the storage capacity for their harvest”.
But with illiteracy
among smallholders at 32 percent, according to the FAO, offline village
associations are necessary.
As climate change
bites, Nour warns bottom-up approaches are essential.
These associations could, for example, communicate
extreme weather events quickly and directly to farmers whose crops are at risk.
These tools exist,
the sociologist said. “We just need to make them available to small farmers.”
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