RedMaistre
RedMaistre
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"Egypt is interested in creating a free trade zone with the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), the country's Ambassador to Russia Mohammed Badri said Friday.
"Egypt would like to join the negotiations on the establishment of a free trade zone between Egypt and the Eurasian Economic Union. Preliminary consultations are underway," the ambassador said at a press conference at news agency Rossiya Segodnya's press center in Moscow.
"I think that within a year the picture will become clearer and will contribute to the revitalization of our trading activities in the future," he added.
The ambassador also noted that his country hopes to develop deeper cooperation with Russia in a number of fields."
"Russia will help Egypt develop nuclear power plants and train personnel to create a new nuclear power industry in the country."
This signals a far more substantial deal than the Western press was projecting just a day ago:
"For its part, Egypt may desire some kind of small-scale arms deal with Russia, but its primary interest in hosting Putin is to show that it is not beholden to US foreign policy, said HA Hellyer, an Egypt specialist at Harvard University’s Kennedy school. “There are going to be political benefits to showing that they don’t need to be tied and bound to US – they can look to China, and they can look to Russia,” said Hellyer."
Whether Egypt's drifts towards alignment with the Anti-American axis globally will feed into a change of its policy regarding Palestine is a different question. Certainly there have already in recent months efforts to draw closer to Iran.
Another thing to look out for, going forward is which elements of Egypt's ruling and political classes are in favor of this direction, and which are not. This may signal a peculiar political tendency of the army more than it does the spontaneous tendencies of the NDP's felool, the Sadist nouveaux riches, or the hapless technocratic liberal taking classes.
Certainly opposition to American Empire has always had a more solid basis among the Egyptian masses than anywhere else, and Sisi has from the beginning tried to tap into this popular political consciousness even as he has done the dirty work of maintaining the Saudi-Israeli-US axis in Cairo and in Gaza. Perhaps the objective contradictions between Egypt's interests and its regional allies, which already led Sisi to back away from the assault on Syria, however, is forcing a more substantial change of direction.
"Egypt would like to join the negotiations on the establishment of a free trade zone between Egypt and the Eurasian Economic Union. Preliminary consultations are underway," the ambassador said at a press conference at news agency Rossiya Segodnya's press center in Moscow.
"I think that within a year the picture will become clearer and will contribute to the revitalization of our trading activities in the future," he added.
The ambassador also noted that his country hopes to develop deeper cooperation with Russia in a number of fields."
"Russia will help Egypt develop nuclear power plants and train personnel to create a new nuclear power industry in the country."
This signals a far more substantial deal than the Western press was projecting just a day ago:
"For its part, Egypt may desire some kind of small-scale arms deal with Russia, but its primary interest in hosting Putin is to show that it is not beholden to US foreign policy, said HA Hellyer, an Egypt specialist at Harvard University’s Kennedy school. “There are going to be political benefits to showing that they don’t need to be tied and bound to US – they can look to China, and they can look to Russia,” said Hellyer."
Whether Egypt's drifts towards alignment with the Anti-American axis globally will feed into a change of its policy regarding Palestine is a different question. Certainly there have already in recent months efforts to draw closer to Iran.
Another thing to look out for, going forward is which elements of Egypt's ruling and political classes are in favor of this direction, and which are not. This may signal a peculiar political tendency of the army more than it does the spontaneous tendencies of the NDP's felool, the Sadist nouveaux riches, or the hapless technocratic liberal taking classes.
Certainly opposition to American Empire has always had a more solid basis among the Egyptian masses than anywhere else, and Sisi has from the beginning tried to tap into this popular political consciousness even as he has done the dirty work of maintaining the Saudi-Israeli-US axis in Cairo and in Gaza. Perhaps the objective contradictions between Egypt's interests and its regional allies, which already led Sisi to back away from the assault on Syria, however, is forcing a more substantial change of direction.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
NoamTrotsky
NoamTrotsky
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They would never do anything that would cause them to lose the U.S. foreign aid that feeds 99% of the population
RedMaistre
RedMaistre
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That may very well be; to truly delink from the US would likely require a radical overturning of social relations in the countryside* that would redistribute the land, thereby completing the work of the 1952 revolution:
"The USAID report mentioned that 94 percent of landholdings were of less than five feddans. What it failed to mention is that the remaining 6 percent of landholders, with holdings from 5 feddans up to the legal limit of 50 feddans per individual or 100 feddans per family with dependent children, controlled 33 percent of the country’s agricultural area. Since the mid-1970s these large landholdings have increased in number; by 1982 they represented 10 percent of holdings and controlled 47.5 percent of the country’s cultivated area.
These official figures under-represent the concentration of landholding, for they are based on village land registers. Actual studies of landholding in individual villages frequently reveal a much greater concentration of ownership, with the largest farms being registered under several different names to stay within the legal limit. The official limits also do not apply to the large holdings of agribusiness corporations. Bechtel International Agribusiness Division, for example, manages a 10,000-feddan estate in Nubariyya owned by a Gulf investor. The Delta Sugar Company, 50.3 percent owned by the Egyptian state sugar company and 49.7 percent by a group of Egyptian and international banks, owns a 40,000-feddan estate on irrigated land in the north-central Delta.
The official limit of 50 to 100 feddans should be compared with the limit of around seven feddans (three hectares) achieved in the early 1950s by the land reform programs of Taiwan and South Korea. In Korea, less than 20 percent of the land in 1975 was held in farms of two hectares or more (approximately five feddans), while in Egypt almost half the land (47.5 percent) is in holdings above this limit. On the other hand, almost one third of landholders in Egypt (32.3 percent) have holdings under one feddan, amounting to only 6 percent of the agricultural area. A significant but unmeasured proportion of the agricultural work force, which totaled 4.3 million workers in 1985, still remains without any land at all.
If Egypt were to carry out land reform measures comparable to those of South Korea and Taiwan, the problem of landlessness and near landlessness would be eliminated. By placing the ceiling on landholding at three feddans (almost five times the minimum required to support a family), at least 2.6 million feddans of land would be available for redistribution. If distributed to the landless and near landless, no agricultural household in Egypt would have less than the 15 qirats required to feed itself. Total agricultural production might also increase, as there is evidence that small farmers produce larger yields per feddan than large farmers."
.And the present day Egypt military, with its extensive economic investments in the current status quo, is not likely to decide to renew the fight against landlordism any time soon. Certainly not under the fairly cautious leadership of Nasser le Petit.*
At the same time however, we should bear in mind that this reliance on Yankee foodstuffs is not a recent neoliberal phenomena, but a fact that has been in play since even the heady height of Pan-Arabism during the early 1960s. And, as the leadership of the Colonel Nasser during this period demonstrated, with or without the dependence on American aid, the Egyptian state has been willing to go considerably out of its way to cross Washington:
"The Kennedy administration made a major effort to build relations with Nasser on a foundation of American wheat. In 1961, PL 480 shipments accounted for 77 percent of Egyptian wheat imports, and 38 percent of Egypt’s net supply of wheat and wheat flour; in 1962, the corresponding figures were 99 percent of wheat imports and 53 percent of net supply. By 1963, Egypt had become the world’s largest per capita consumer of American food aid.
As Ambassador John Badeau later explained, “we attempted to expand the size and duration of our food aid agreements with Egypt very gradually at first, so that Nasser would be made to appreciate the link between his behavior and Congressional support for our aid program.” In October 1962, the administration announced a three-year agreement whereby the US would provide Egypt with more than $400 million worth of food for fiscal years 1963, 1964 and 1965.
Egypt’s intervention in North Yemen that same month marked a downturn in US-Egyptian relations. Kennedy came under heavy Congressional attack, and in late 1963, he threatened to terminate US aid if Nasser did not begin troop withdrawals from Yemen by December of that year. In the transition of power to Lyndon Johnson, the deadline passed with neither a troop withdrawal nor a suspension of aid. But Congress’ mood grew increasingly hostile in response to events in late 1964: the burning of the US Information Agency Library in Cairo; the downing of a US private airplane over Egypt; a speech by President Nasser attacking US policy; and the confirmation by Nasser of Egyptian aid to rebels fighting the Western-installed regime in what had been the Belgian Congo. Congress was also upset at the lack of publicity Nasser gave to PL 480. After a brief trip to Egypt in the fall of 1964, Congressman Thomas Stafford (R-Vt.) concluded that “it was my very strong impression that the citizens of that country, except for those in the seaport where some of our aid comes in, have no idea that the wheat being distributed there comes from the United States. They believe that Mr. Nasser raised it himself.” In a December 23, 1964 speech, Nasser claimed that Egyptians were prepared to reduce their food consumption in order to fight Western imperialism.
In late 1964-early 1965, the Johnson administration withheld the last $37 million of the three-year PL 480 agreement in order to soothe Congress’ retributive mood and thus protect the fiscal year 1966 foreign aid bill. At the same time, the administration negotiated a new agreement much more limited in size and scope -- only $55 million for only six months. Moreover, now 25 percent would have to be repaid in dollars. Egypt was now on a much tighter food leash.
The next step came in April 1966, when President Johnson refused to respond to Nasir's request for a renewal of the six-month PL 480 agreement. In late February 1967, Nasser told the US ambassador that “we have been patient with all the pressure you have applied to us with your aid program, but our patience has run out.”
In July 1967, the Cairo AID mission concluded that it had been 'unrealistic to expect that President Nasser would abandon or significantly modify political actions which he determined to be in his own and Egypt’s best interest in consideration of continued American wheat imports.'"
Again, Sisi is not a Nasser, nor really could be, under present historical conditions. But it certainly is possible that he could continue to go out of his way repeatedly to defy the United States, trusting that his American patron (and Israel) would prefer to keep him still within the network rather than risk seeing him go off the reservation.
*but even the present regime is aware, in a distorted way, of the fundamental problem:
“Land should be given for free, if we want to urbanise the desert and take people away from Cairo. Whoever is not serious about what they are doing should have their land withdrawn,” Abou Ali says.
*hypothetically, as in the case of South Korea and Taiwan, revolution from above in the countryside could come from pressure by the United States itself to preempt more radical solutions; but early cold war new deal liberalism is unlikely to be returning anytime soon.
The article could have mentioned the red examples of China or Vietnam as well. Striking how massive land reform during the 20th century is the common denominator all across one of the most economically dynamic regions in the world in the 21th century....
"The USAID report mentioned that 94 percent of landholdings were of less than five feddans. What it failed to mention is that the remaining 6 percent of landholders, with holdings from 5 feddans up to the legal limit of 50 feddans per individual or 100 feddans per family with dependent children, controlled 33 percent of the country’s agricultural area. Since the mid-1970s these large landholdings have increased in number; by 1982 they represented 10 percent of holdings and controlled 47.5 percent of the country’s cultivated area.
These official figures under-represent the concentration of landholding, for they are based on village land registers. Actual studies of landholding in individual villages frequently reveal a much greater concentration of ownership, with the largest farms being registered under several different names to stay within the legal limit. The official limits also do not apply to the large holdings of agribusiness corporations. Bechtel International Agribusiness Division, for example, manages a 10,000-feddan estate in Nubariyya owned by a Gulf investor. The Delta Sugar Company, 50.3 percent owned by the Egyptian state sugar company and 49.7 percent by a group of Egyptian and international banks, owns a 40,000-feddan estate on irrigated land in the north-central Delta.
The official limit of 50 to 100 feddans should be compared with the limit of around seven feddans (three hectares) achieved in the early 1950s by the land reform programs of Taiwan and South Korea. In Korea, less than 20 percent of the land in 1975 was held in farms of two hectares or more (approximately five feddans), while in Egypt almost half the land (47.5 percent) is in holdings above this limit. On the other hand, almost one third of landholders in Egypt (32.3 percent) have holdings under one feddan, amounting to only 6 percent of the agricultural area. A significant but unmeasured proportion of the agricultural work force, which totaled 4.3 million workers in 1985, still remains without any land at all.
If Egypt were to carry out land reform measures comparable to those of South Korea and Taiwan, the problem of landlessness and near landlessness would be eliminated. By placing the ceiling on landholding at three feddans (almost five times the minimum required to support a family), at least 2.6 million feddans of land would be available for redistribution. If distributed to the landless and near landless, no agricultural household in Egypt would have less than the 15 qirats required to feed itself. Total agricultural production might also increase, as there is evidence that small farmers produce larger yields per feddan than large farmers."
.And the present day Egypt military, with its extensive economic investments in the current status quo, is not likely to decide to renew the fight against landlordism any time soon. Certainly not under the fairly cautious leadership of Nasser le Petit.*
At the same time however, we should bear in mind that this reliance on Yankee foodstuffs is not a recent neoliberal phenomena, but a fact that has been in play since even the heady height of Pan-Arabism during the early 1960s. And, as the leadership of the Colonel Nasser during this period demonstrated, with or without the dependence on American aid, the Egyptian state has been willing to go considerably out of its way to cross Washington:
"The Kennedy administration made a major effort to build relations with Nasser on a foundation of American wheat. In 1961, PL 480 shipments accounted for 77 percent of Egyptian wheat imports, and 38 percent of Egypt’s net supply of wheat and wheat flour; in 1962, the corresponding figures were 99 percent of wheat imports and 53 percent of net supply. By 1963, Egypt had become the world’s largest per capita consumer of American food aid.
As Ambassador John Badeau later explained, “we attempted to expand the size and duration of our food aid agreements with Egypt very gradually at first, so that Nasser would be made to appreciate the link between his behavior and Congressional support for our aid program.” In October 1962, the administration announced a three-year agreement whereby the US would provide Egypt with more than $400 million worth of food for fiscal years 1963, 1964 and 1965.
Egypt’s intervention in North Yemen that same month marked a downturn in US-Egyptian relations. Kennedy came under heavy Congressional attack, and in late 1963, he threatened to terminate US aid if Nasser did not begin troop withdrawals from Yemen by December of that year. In the transition of power to Lyndon Johnson, the deadline passed with neither a troop withdrawal nor a suspension of aid. But Congress’ mood grew increasingly hostile in response to events in late 1964: the burning of the US Information Agency Library in Cairo; the downing of a US private airplane over Egypt; a speech by President Nasser attacking US policy; and the confirmation by Nasser of Egyptian aid to rebels fighting the Western-installed regime in what had been the Belgian Congo. Congress was also upset at the lack of publicity Nasser gave to PL 480. After a brief trip to Egypt in the fall of 1964, Congressman Thomas Stafford (R-Vt.) concluded that “it was my very strong impression that the citizens of that country, except for those in the seaport where some of our aid comes in, have no idea that the wheat being distributed there comes from the United States. They believe that Mr. Nasser raised it himself.” In a December 23, 1964 speech, Nasser claimed that Egyptians were prepared to reduce their food consumption in order to fight Western imperialism.
In late 1964-early 1965, the Johnson administration withheld the last $37 million of the three-year PL 480 agreement in order to soothe Congress’ retributive mood and thus protect the fiscal year 1966 foreign aid bill. At the same time, the administration negotiated a new agreement much more limited in size and scope -- only $55 million for only six months. Moreover, now 25 percent would have to be repaid in dollars. Egypt was now on a much tighter food leash.
The next step came in April 1966, when President Johnson refused to respond to Nasir's request for a renewal of the six-month PL 480 agreement. In late February 1967, Nasser told the US ambassador that “we have been patient with all the pressure you have applied to us with your aid program, but our patience has run out.”
In July 1967, the Cairo AID mission concluded that it had been 'unrealistic to expect that President Nasser would abandon or significantly modify political actions which he determined to be in his own and Egypt’s best interest in consideration of continued American wheat imports.'"
Again, Sisi is not a Nasser, nor really could be, under present historical conditions. But it certainly is possible that he could continue to go out of his way repeatedly to defy the United States, trusting that his American patron (and Israel) would prefer to keep him still within the network rather than risk seeing him go off the reservation.
*but even the present regime is aware, in a distorted way, of the fundamental problem:
“Land should be given for free, if we want to urbanise the desert and take people away from Cairo. Whoever is not serious about what they are doing should have their land withdrawn,” Abou Ali says.
*hypothetically, as in the case of South Korea and Taiwan, revolution from above in the countryside could come from pressure by the United States itself to preempt more radical solutions; but early cold war new deal liberalism is unlikely to be returning anytime soon.
The article could have mentioned the red examples of China or Vietnam as well. Striking how massive land reform during the 20th century is the common denominator all across one of the most economically dynamic regions in the world in the 21th century....
Edited by RedMaistre ()
NoamTrotsky
NoamTrotsky
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It has nothing to do with capitalism or whatever, it's just physically impossible for Egypt to feed itself. At 3 million hectares, 10 tons/ha and 1 ton/person/year that wouldn't even work.
The Jews have engineered things such that any anti imperialism, foreign aid cut, or deviation from global liberalism will result in massive "humanitarian catastrophe".
The Jews have engineered things such that any anti imperialism, foreign aid cut, or deviation from global liberalism will result in massive "humanitarian catastrophe".
Edited by NoamTrotsky ()
RedMaistre
RedMaistre
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Its not physically impossible for Egypt to feed itself. It could feed itself, if so much of the cultivable land was not owned by well off private and semiprivate owners who are more interested in breeding and feeding animals to satisfy the high demand for meat among the better off city dwellers. It reflects a partly unwritten political consensus among various domestic and international class interests instead of a geographic destiny.
To quote the first article I quoted from:
"But before accepting this conclusion we should reach, once again, for the calculator. Between 1965 and 1980, according to World Bank tables, the population of Egypt grew at an annual rate of 2.2 percent. Yet during the same period, the World Bank also shows, agricultural production grew at the even faster rate of 2.7 percent a year. During the 1980s, when the population growth rate increased to 2.7 percent a year, agricultural growth continued to keep ahead. In 1987, food production per capita was 11 percent higher than at the beginning of the decade. So it is not true that the population has been growing faster than the country’s ability to feed itself.....
The massive dependence on grain imports since 1974 owes not to population growth, but to a shift to meat consumption. Rather than importing animal feed directly, though, Egypt has diverted domestic production from human to animal consumption; human consumption of maize (corn) and other coarse grains (barley, sorghum) dropped from 53 percent of domestic production in 1966 to 6 percent in 1988. Human supplies were made up with imports, largely of wheat for bread making. So it appears as though the imports were required because people needed more bread. USAID has supported the massive shift to meat consumption among the better off since 1975 by financing over $3 billion worth of Egyptian grain purchases from the United States. Yet the agency claims that the purpose of these subsidies has been “to help the poor....
The shift to the production of meat and other animal products has two principal causes. First, as Ikram puts it, “Effective demand has been modified by a change in income distribution.” In other words, the growing disparity in income between rich and poor has enabled the better off to divert the country’s resources from the production of staples to the production of luxury items. Second, the Egyptian government, supported by large American loans, has encouraged this diversion by subsidizing the import of staples for consumers, heavily taxing the production of staples by farmers, and subsidizing the production of meat, poultry and dairy products. Livestock raising is particularly concentrated on large farms, those over ten feddans, where there are three to four times as many cattle per feddan as on farms of one to ten feddans. Yet as a result of government food policy even the smallest farmers have been forced to shift from self-provisioning to the production of animal products and to rely increasingly on subsidized imported flour for their staple diet."
To quote the first article I quoted from:
"But before accepting this conclusion we should reach, once again, for the calculator. Between 1965 and 1980, according to World Bank tables, the population of Egypt grew at an annual rate of 2.2 percent. Yet during the same period, the World Bank also shows, agricultural production grew at the even faster rate of 2.7 percent a year. During the 1980s, when the population growth rate increased to 2.7 percent a year, agricultural growth continued to keep ahead. In 1987, food production per capita was 11 percent higher than at the beginning of the decade. So it is not true that the population has been growing faster than the country’s ability to feed itself.....
The massive dependence on grain imports since 1974 owes not to population growth, but to a shift to meat consumption. Rather than importing animal feed directly, though, Egypt has diverted domestic production from human to animal consumption; human consumption of maize (corn) and other coarse grains (barley, sorghum) dropped from 53 percent of domestic production in 1966 to 6 percent in 1988. Human supplies were made up with imports, largely of wheat for bread making. So it appears as though the imports were required because people needed more bread. USAID has supported the massive shift to meat consumption among the better off since 1975 by financing over $3 billion worth of Egyptian grain purchases from the United States. Yet the agency claims that the purpose of these subsidies has been “to help the poor....
The shift to the production of meat and other animal products has two principal causes. First, as Ikram puts it, “Effective demand has been modified by a change in income distribution.” In other words, the growing disparity in income between rich and poor has enabled the better off to divert the country’s resources from the production of staples to the production of luxury items. Second, the Egyptian government, supported by large American loans, has encouraged this diversion by subsidizing the import of staples for consumers, heavily taxing the production of staples by farmers, and subsidizing the production of meat, poultry and dairy products. Livestock raising is particularly concentrated on large farms, those over ten feddans, where there are three to four times as many cattle per feddan as on farms of one to ten feddans. Yet as a result of government food policy even the smallest farmers have been forced to shift from self-provisioning to the production of animal products and to rely increasingly on subsidized imported flour for their staple diet."
RedMaistre
RedMaistre
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(also you note are the one who invoked first "capitalism" as the abstract, catch all categorical explanation for what's wrong with Egypt. The argument I was making referred to the concrete matter of who owns the countryside, something which both bourgeois and red political actors have recognized as important, as,again, the case of 20th century East Asia would show).
Edited by RedMaistre ()
cars
cars
UNUSUALY COOL
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The USAID report mentioned that 94 percent of landholdings were of less than five fedoras
NoamTrotsky
NoamTrotsky
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none of that stuff refutes what i said
RedMaistre
RedMaistre
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NoamTrotsky posted:none of that stuff refutes what i said
Regarding the "99%" food dependence o America point: Russia supplies 40% of the grain, and there has been recent talk of increasing this trade:
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/02/moscow-cairo-relations-sisi-putin-egypt-visit.html
http://journal-neo.org/2015/02/13/rus-moskva-kair-cotrudnichestvo-pastet/
http://ru-facts.com/news/view/43717.html
http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2015/02/12/bilateral-agreements-russia-elimination-us-dollar/
NoamTrotsky
NoamTrotsky
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now thats what i call winning a debate with mustang
my worldview is based on googled economics articles written in 1975
my worldview is based on googled economics articles written in 1975
RedMaistre
RedMaistre
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NoamTrotsky posted:now thats what i call winning a debate with mustang
my worldview is based on googled economics articles written in 1975
I think I have only a vague understanding of both what the name "mustang" means and what "winning" looks like on tHE rHizzonE.
But I take what victories I can get 