Alternative Policy Solutions | Governing Informality and Tenure Precarity in Egypt’s Reclaimed Lands

Governing Informality and Tenure Precarity in Egypt’s Reclaimed Lands

  • 9 Feb, 2020

Salwa Salman

Salwa Salman is a former Researcher at Takween for Integrated Community Development, and former Fellow and a Research Assistant at the American University in Cairo where she obtained her M.A. degree in Middle East Studies.

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Consecutive Egyptian governments have turned to desert reclamation[i] policies to compensate for the loss of agricultural lands to urban expansion and to alleviate the concentration of Egypt’s population in the Nile River Valley and Delta (constituting 4% of Egypt’s land area). Due to the exponential growth of an informal desert sector, the State Land Recovery Commission was established in 2016, resulting in successive waves of state land retrieval and registration and the collection of LE8.5 billion to date.[ii]

Egypt’s long history of inconsistent land tenure and distribution policies for reclaimed lands has led to the accumulation of precariously held properties, thus adding to the complexity of the informal desert sector. The question, then, is whether ongoing efforts to register reclaimed lands work toward resolving tenure precarity in desert lands or add to the policy mess.

The pursuit of equitable land distribution

Law 143/1981 on Egyptian desert lands defines desert areas—that is, all land located two kilometers outside city borders—as one category of private-state land. The main distinction between public- and private-state lands is that the latter can be leased, sold, granted, or transferred to private entities or individuals. Until 1952, an exclusive distribution system of state lands known as iqtaʿ, whereby the state granted full land ownership or rights of land exploitation to individuals, led to the concentration of agricultural lands within a small class of elites; by 1952, 5.8% of landowners held 65.5% of all land, while 94.2% of landowners owned the rest.[iii]

Accordingly, the equal distribution of land to small landholders and landless farmers became a fundamental stated objective of the 1952 revolution. The enactment of the first Agrarian Reform Bill in 1952 limited land ownership to 200 feddans[iv] per household. In the same year, the Higher Committee for Agrarian Reform (HCAR), headed by Sayid Marei, was established to manage the (re)distribution of requisitioned and newly reclaimed lands. Upholding the revolution’s objectives, the HCAR advocated distributing parcels of 2.5–5 feddans to individual farmers.[v]

In 1954, however, the Tahrir Province[vi] emerged as a site of contesting tenure policies and ownership modalities. In 1957, Magdy Hassanein, a military engineer and one of the Free Officers, became the head of the Tahrir Province Organization (TPO), a bureaucratic body that administered the province. Through the TPO, Hassanein supported the establishment of Soviet-financed large state farms in South Tahrir with thousands of farmers as workers, not owners, which conflicted with the HCAR’s approach of equal land distribution. By the end of the 1960s, only 6,000 out of 15,000 feddans in South Tahrir and 2,350 out of 49,300 feddans in North Tahrir were distributed among small landholders.[vii]

 During the 1970s and 80s, the Egyptian government further diverged  from its earlier, pro-small landholders' approach. With the real estate and credit boom following the economic liberalization reforms (infitah) in 1974, President Sadat focused on directing investments and international funding toward the construction of new desert cities like the 10th of Ramadan (1977), 6th of October (1979), Sadat City (1978), 15th of May (1978), and Borg El-Arab (1979). Accordingly, the General Authority for Reclamation Projects and Agricultural Development (GARPAD) and the New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA) were established in 1975 and 1979, respectively, to outline the general policy for desert land reclamation, utilization, and cultivation. Active until today, they represent central state institutions that own desert lands and play a vital role in reclamation and distribution processes.

The enactment of Law 96/1992 on land tenancy (implemented in 1997), which eventually led to the eviction of an estimated 904,000 tenants,[viii] is another example of the state’s departure from earlier agrarian reform policies. Under the law, agricultural land rent would increase from seven to 22 times the value of the land tax within the first five years, after which landowners were free to set rent according to market prices. Aiming to mitigate the impact of the loss of tenancy, the Mubarak Project for Youth Graduates, a desert reclamation project created in 1987 to stem the growing rate of unemployed youth, started accepting applications from affected landless farmers in 1997, but the Mubarak project prioritized university graduates, allocating a 5-feddan parcel of land to graduates and 2.5 feddans to evicted tenants.[ix]

These shifts in patterns of desert land distribution contributed to the accumulation of precariously held properties, especially those held by small farmers and landholders. By the late twentieth century, two types of informal tenure in desert lands were growing, one associated with a rising trend of desert land-grabbing and another led by small landholders and desert reclamation beneficiaries who cultivated the lands for a small profit.[x]

Reconciliation and security of tenure: Theory vs. practice

According to the Minister of Agriculture, some 1.3 million feddans were under informal cultivation and/or reclamation in 2006.[xi] In 2019, squatter reclamation[xii] accounted for the cultivation of 200,000 feddans (207,600 acres),[xiii] in comparison to 59,200 feddans of formal reclaimed land.

Source: CAPMAS, Statistical Yearbook-Agriculture, 2018.

Before the establishment of the National Commission for Retrieving State Land in 2016, the government had initiated several projects to formalize desert reclamation and settlement. Most significant was its attempt to grant desert land occupants full ownership of uncultivated lands upon proving that they had cultivated and peacefully occupied the area for fifteen years, adopting a customary, Islamic legal practice known as wad’ al-yadd, whereby uncultivated lands (mūwāt) are transferred from the state to the private domain through cultivation and peaceful occupation. The GARPAD and other state institutions with direct claim over the lands (gehāt elwelāyāh) were assigned to assess potential land grabs. However, only a few individuals sought formalization due to the ambiguity of registration and lack of trust in the process (i.e., whether it would provide security of tenure).

On 9 February 2016, the President issued Decree 75 to establish the State Land Recovery Commission, chaired by Ibrahim Mehleb, former advisor to the president for national projects and former prime minister. Earlier in 2015, Mehleb had met with Peruvian development economist Hernando de Soto to discuss the possibility of reforming Egypt’s property and land registration system, in light of his work on Egypt.

De Soto’s 1997 publication “Dead Capital and the Poor in Egypt” outlines six steps toward reforming Egypt’s property registration system, including (1) identifying the main challenges to formal registration and collecting information on the informal property market, (2) implementing an administrative and institutional reform strategy, (3) collecting proof of ownership, (4) establishing a “communication strategy” to raise awareness among informal communities, (5) developing “registry, surveying, and, mapping technologies” and finally (6) integrating the informal sector. The commission has implemented most of these steps.

Law 143/1981 on desert lands and Law 144/2017 governing private-state property both regulate the reconciliation process. According to these laws, governorates are responsible for supervising the registration process in cooperation with the state commission, state institutions, and gehāt elwelāyāh. In this context, the governorate is responsible for receiving applications, forming evaluation committees from the different ministries and governmental authorities, and involving gehāt elwelāyāh.

 Policy mess or accumulation by dispossession?

While the redistribution of desert lands contributed somewhat to the empowerment of small and landless farmers during the 1950s and 60s, inconsistent tenure policies mean that thousands of small landholders live with the fear of eviction and insecure tenure. Shifts between models of ownership and ambiguities in the reclamation and registration processes led to the predominance of informal practices. While the State Land Recovery Commission has made various efforts to connect state institutions through a coherent system/process, a re-examination of the dynamics contributing to desert informality—that is, land pricing and service acquisition—is crucial.

Furthermore, although the process of reconciliation/registration is unified by law, the adoption of a single standard process for different types of state lands and owners (including cultivated state lands) leads to the exclusion of the vulnerable. Creating a system that marginalizes small landholders poses a significant threat to the future of land reclamation in Egypt and enforces the dispossession of small landholders in favor of the more privileged.

[i] For the purposes of this commentary, desert reclamation is the process of reclaiming desert lands for cultivation.
[ii] State Land Recovery Commission (28 November 2019).  Retrieved from http://www.estrdad.gov.eg/NewsDetails.aspx?NewsId=136.
[iii] Gadalla, S. M. (1962). Land reform in relation to social development, Egypt.
[iv] One feddan is equal to 1.038 acres.
[v] Adriansen, H. K. (2009). Land reclamation in Egypt: A study of life in the new lands. Geoforum, 40(4), 664–74.
[vi] An area that stretches along the west of the Delta to the outskirt of Alexandria.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] El Nour, S. (2015). Small farmers and the revolution in Egypt: the forgotten actors. Contemporary Arab Affairs, 8(2), 198–211.
[ix] Adriansen, (2009).
[x] Sims, D. (2015). Egypt's desert dreams: development or disaster? Oxford University Press.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] David Sims uses the term “squatter reclamation” in his Egypt's desert dreams: development or disaster? to describe the process of the informal cultivation of desert lands.
[xiii] الصاوي، أ. (17 يوليو، 2019). الزراعيين: 125 مليار جنيه عوائد مرتقبة للدولة من تقنين أراضي وضع اليد. أخبار المال، https://almalnews.com/

References

Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not reflect the opinions of The American University in Cairo or Alternative Policy Solutions.

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