An overlooked fact about agriculture in the Middle East and North Africa is how central small or family farms are to the region’s economy and politics. For example, 54% of Tunisian farmers work on 11% of the agricultural area and in Egypt 91% farmers share 50% total agricultural area with farms less than 5 acres, averaging 1.25 acres. Local food systems are the product of and influence broad processes of local and national political economy, as well as structures of the global food regime.

It is therefore important to not only focus on the role and importance of small farmers, but how they also have been unevenly incorporated into the world system. Egypt is second only to Indonesia in its dependency on imported wheat. Securing imports have led to political contortions and complicity by the Egyptian state with US imperialism, subordination to Israel’s occupation in Palestine, and dependence on US military assistance of $1.5 billion per annum since 1980 and an additional $30 billion in economic assistance.

It bears repeating that small farmers were part of the 2010/11 uprisings. Crises in food production, distribution and cropping choice impacted the urban poor disproportionately. The dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia were brought to an end (although only briefly in Egypt) by demonstrations against poverty, economic reform, and demand for cheaper food. The dramatic increase in food prices that followed the global financial crash of 2007/8 was a catalyst for the uprisings.

The revolutionary slogans in Tunisia were, “Bread, Water, No Ben Ali” and in Egypt “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice.” In highlighting the myriad forms of political interventions by small farmers, we are reminded of the late Egyptian activist who noted, reflecting on the comments of her husband who was murdered by a large landowning family in 1966 that, “Salah used to tell me that the Egyptian people are like running water under a stable bed of mud. On the surface it looks tranquil but underneath runs a stream of flowing water. That is why they will revolt.”

Our book, Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa. Agrarian Questions in Egypt and Tunisia, just published by Anthem Press, is the first major account of agrarian political economy in the region of North Africa and the Middle East. It is certainly the first that looks systematically and in a comparative way at the political economy of agrarian transformation and farmer resistance in Egypt and Tunisia.

We make two major interventions: One, we locate the role of rural struggles and agrarian transformation as the backdrop to the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings—and two, we draw on new original research regarding farmer responses to regime change. We also advance the discussion about food security and food sovereignty.

We assemble a critique against the trade-based tropes of food security and highlight how historical policies of agricultural modernization have increased rural abjection, poverty, and de-development. We do this with a historical materialist analysis of the region that embraces the longue durée highlighting long term historical processes and structures rather than focusing only on a series of events.

The long-term processes that impact on peasant livelihoods are shifts in the patterns of trade and production, changes in climate and demography, and capital accumulation, wages, and prices. Policy and practice are not reducible to frailties of government—although this may be evident. Policy is always a product of contested economic and political power shaped by capitalism and its historical development.

In this sense our broad historical analysis periodizes North Africa’s incorporation into the world economy through colonialism up to the mid-1950s; state redistributive development until 1970; the return to capitalist development until economic reform in 1991; and the neoliberal push that this period is overlaid with between 1987-2010, followed by imperial wars of intervention.

Our overarching argument is the need to move from the trade-based idea of food security to one of food sovereignty.