There has never been a more important time to discuss rural transformation and agricultural modernization in the Middle East and North Africa and yet it is also probably the most difficult time to attempt to do so. This question is particularly relevant in light of the acute and mutually reinforcing food, agrarian and environmental crises which have become so acute in the last decades of neoliberal political reforms, economic restructuring and imperialism (Ayeb and Bush 2019). There is in fact a core paradox at the heart of research on the rural societies in the MENA region. While it is the world’s most food import dependent region, importing more than 60 per cent of its needs, research on the region’s food producers, small scale family farmers and the dynamics of agrarian change is scant and limited. Few studies deal with land questions, agrarian transformation, food systems and environmental deterioration in the Middle East compared to other regions in the world. The region is in fact under-represented in terms of publications in the main agrarian and critical development studies journals such as the Journal of Peasant Studies and the Journal of Agrarian Change and in other platforms (Ajl 2020).
This omission is even more relevant when we see that the region which hosts 20 million family farmers units according to FAO and 43% of the population is defined as rural (Bush 2016). It is also a region which has been one of the epicentres of food riots against escalating food prices and authoritarian neoliberalism (Bush and Martiniello 2018). Indeed, most research on the region’s ‘food security’ is tied to dated ideas of agricultural modernisation and global agricultural value chains that reify agribusiness and ignores, or more accurately pushes out of focus, any reference to small farmers and their role and agency in the dynamics of agrarian change and rural development. And yet the states in the region have been aggressively pursuing agricultural ‘strategies’ that accelerate decline in sustainability of small farmer producers, preferring instead to incentivise agribusiness and large scale capital intensive agriculture and promoting a view of an agriculture without farmers (Bush 2000) and a trade-based approach to food security. A mix of economic reforms, war and conflict, human displacement and ecological deterioration have all significantly contributed to agrarian, food and social reproduction crises, which we fail to capture, in part because of the ways the rural Middle East and North Africa has been historically represented.
This panel proposal welcomes abstracts from scholars interested in exploring the character of Agrarian Questions in the Middle East and North Africa. In particular it is interested in grappling with a number of sub-themes and issues including:
Speaker: Prof. Giuliano Martiniello, Université Internationale de Rabat, Center for Global Studies.
