If the opportunity is available to you for getting a look, precise and deep look, on the conditions of farmers in rural Egypt, you will end up with a mind full of questions. This report was issued amid the huge sufferings underwent by small farmers in Egypt.
However, the conditions of farmers are no different from those of farm workers and many other sectors of people who live in the rural areas. Thus we find, for instance, the farmer workers who do in the processes of harvesting and plowing, as well as the small merchants and women and child labor working in the agriculture, live under sever conditions. Indeed, all of those groups are in urgent need to securing their means of life in order to be able to perform their developmental role. This role that occupies the first rank in the schedule of Egypt’s National Production. The villagers, whether are owners of small pieces of lands, those who lease plots from the big landowners, or the day-to-day wage workers and their women and children do impose a commitment on us to care and interest in their situation and their rights as well.
Here, our duty is to monitor as well as to discover the needs of those groups and to dedicate to defend on their issues. This should be through several ways. Firstly, to show the reasons of their problems, secondly to monitor the most important obstacles that hinder them from accessing to their own rights and thirdly to search for the appropriate means and measurements are needed for provide them suitable life.
This is the main reason of existence of this report, to monitor the problems and suggest the proper solutions likely to be carried out on practice in the rural areas. Still, the report provides the importance also from another dimension, represented in a reply on the predominant thoughts about the farmers that there are passive and careless people who are not interested in participating in the common affairs. Thus the real experience we have with them, learnt us that they are exonerated their passiveness. Because the officials of the governmental authorities, such as the Agricultural Development and Credit Bank (ADCP), the agrarian cooperatives etc. become as a burden to the farmers and that a farmer does want to see none of them even by chance.
So, what are the historic and political practices that led the farmers to be described as passive people feeling with prejudice and fearing from the authorities of government? How could we, after this uncontroversial result, to apply on them those programs for reforming and revamping their life, to which they do not take a part? Are we correct, then, when describing them as passive people?
No doubt that the farmers of Egypt do constantly aim to lead a secure and productive life. For this aim they always need to secure their process of agriculture as the main and mostly the lonely source of their livelihood. On the other hand, if they would be happier when the state aims, in its part, to provide those farmers with plots and also to apply for them programs of development in order to improve their life. Why, then, this contradiction between the aims of those programs and the absence of participation of the farmers? The answer of these questions forms another reason for issuing this report that manifests that the absence of response from the governmental authorities to the farmers demands move them on disappointing and passiveness as well as feeling frustrated with the programs initiated and practiced by those authorities.
Also the deteriorated conditions of farmers, monitored in this report left us wondering: why do the farmers in the most remote and poorest villages gain nothing from those programs after twenty years of operation? In the context of this understanding the report also seeks to evaluate the policy of government in the rural areas through showing the most important problems and events that occurred during the first half of 2000.
The report covers all these topics through the five main parts that manage the following issues:
The living, health and inhabiting
conditions of farmers and their problems with the (ADCP) and other governmental
authorities such as the Agricultural Reform, Endowment Agency. The most important disputes between
farmers over the boundaries between plots, ownership, irrigation and
inheritance. The problems that inflamed between
the farmers because the inhabitation particularly under the using of the
military order, according which there were hundreds of houses removes. the most important event of violence
that resulted in 19 murders, 96 injuries and 151 were arrested because they were
involved in that events.Finally, the report ends with
suggesting some recommendations the most important of which are stopping the
expulsion of farmers from the plots of state, and enabling them to cultivating
it. Also stopping the exciting the farmers from their own houses and other
several recommendations as we will see in the section of recommendations.