“Egypt’s Future” on the backs of peasants

In May 2022, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi inaugurated the Mostaqbal Misr (Future of Egypt) project, an agricultural megaproject launched by the armed forces in 2017. The ceremony culminated in a slideshow presentation delivered by the project’s director, Air Force Lt. Col. Bahaa El-Ghannam, replete with aerial photography and infographics.

The presentation—closer in form and tone to an investor roadshow than to a public discussion of agricultural policy—was repeatedly interrupted by the president, who stepped in to explain, reinterpret, or simplify concepts for the audience. El-Ghannam, for his part, limited himself to deferential affirmations such as “Yes, sir” and “Understood, sir,” effectively ceding interpretive authority upward.

This carefully staged exchange offers a condensed illustration of how agricultural knowledge is produced under authoritarian conditions. Political authority monopolizes explanation and interpretation; policy is communicated through techniques of persuasion rather than deliberation; and the figure of the young military officer embodies a new archetype—the investment officer—who fuses hierarchical discipline with the idiom of markets while remaining firmly within the bounds of obedience and excluding any plurality of voices.

Within this configuration, agriculture is stripped of its character as a dense social and economic field and recast as a technocratic problem to be resolved from above. It is then presented to the public as a simplified, finalized solution—one that admits neither contestation nor alternative imaginaries.

This conception of agriculture, and the language through which knowledge about it is produced, has governed the coercive restructuring of access to land, agricultural labor, and critical inputs such as water and energy over the past several years. That restructuring has proceeded along two main trajectories: a state-led model concentrated in newly reclaimed desert lands, and a market-driven model reshaping agriculture in the Delta and the old Nile Valley.

According to state-owned and state-aligned media, Egypt is experiencing a boom in cultivated acreage and fresh produce export volumes. There is some truth to this account. Yet it obscures the profound social costs of the armed forces’ deepening role in agriculture on the one hand, and by the advance of neoliberal policy on the other.

These costs are rooted in an underlying premise that begins with the language of knowledge production itself. Land and the means of production are treated exclusively as commodities. The endpoint of this logic is not merely inequality within agriculture, but the systematic exclusion of peasants and small-scale producers from the agricultural process altogether.

The army and the big investor

A closer examination of how Mostaqbal Misr operates reveals the project as a decisive inflection point in the liberalization of Egyptian agriculture. From its inception, the initiative has been oriented primarily toward large agribusiness firms and foreign investors, while structurally marginalizing small producers.

Just three months after its formal inauguration, Mostaqbal Misr was transformed—by presidential decree—into an agency directly affiliated with the armed forces. In short order, El-Ghannam was promoted to the rank of colonel and awarded a doctorate in agricultural resource development. The project then expanded rapidly, as the state allocated to it millions of feddans of land.

In his televised appearances, El-Ghannam has emphasized the creation of a specialized department for marketing and land contracting, headquartered at the agency’s offices along the Dabaa Axis. This department functions as the primary gateway to land access. Land, in this framework, is no longer treated as a public resource or as an instrument of social empowerment. Instead, it is packaged, marketed, and leased according to pre-established investment criteria: a high minimum plot size, the capacity to absorb infrastructure costs, and a readiness to integrate into market-oriented production rather than local needs.

At the same time, Mostaqbal Misr marks a qualitative shift in the armed forces’ investment strategy. Unlike earlier military ventures—most notably those under the National Service Projects Organization (NSPO)—its core function is not agricultural production. Rather, the project manages land as a capital asset. Value is extracted not through cultivation or the organization of agricultural labor, but through rent, control over access, and the regulation of who may enter the agricultural sector in the first place.

As this model has consolidated over recent years, large-scale land reclamation has effectively been monopolized by two actors: the military, acting as a rentier landlord, and large investors. This has coincided with the marginalization of the NSPO’s productive role, even as the organization has been retained as a vehicle for absorbing military leadership and fulfilling internal social and economic functions.

This arrangement has shielded the armed forces from the criticisms that accompanied their earlier, more direct investments in production, while simultaneously generating a form of pluralism within a single hegemonic order. On one side stands a military-rentier model open to large capital; on the other, an older model of direct exploitation. Both, however, converge in their systematic exclusion of small farmers.

The rapid rise of Mostaqbal Misr

A straightforward review of land-allocation decisions in favor of Mostaqbal Misr traces the agency’s rapid ascent and its growing dominance over Egyptian agriculture. A dense succession of presidential decrees and Cabinet decisions has granted the project extensive rights of use, disposition, and control over vast tracts of state land.

Presidential Decree No. 114 of 2024 constitutes a critical juncture in this trajectory. The decree consolidated and reallocated large areas east of the Suez Canal and across North and Central Sinai to the agency. It was followed later that year by Presidential Decree No. 285 of 2024, which assigned additional lands in Beni Suef/West Minya and Aswan. A further series of decrees—Nos. 338, 339 and 341 of 2024—extended these allocations to include lands in Beheira and Qena for development and service purposes.

Alongside these presidential acts, the Cabinet issued decisions reassigning parcels within the old Valley and the Delta to Mostaqbal Misr, including plots in Giza governorate, as well as decisions transferring or altering land-use purposes in Wadi Al-Natrun.

Taken together, this tightly clustered sequence of executive decisions reveals a mode of state-land redistribution managed from above and largely insulated from the conventional institutional pathways of civilian land-management authorities. Official maps published on the agency’s platforms further underscore the geographic scale of this intervention, extending across the length and breadth of the republic and encompassing an estimated 4.5 million feddans.

These policies represent the most far-reaching neoliberal transformations in Egypt’s contemporary history. They do not, however, reflect a classical liberal retreat of the state. Instead, they exemplify a distinct configuration grounded in a strategic alliance between state power and market forces—what may be described as​​“authoritarian liberalism.” This characterization echoes social scientist Verónica Gago’s conceptualization of neoliberalism as a coercive order, in which the state mobilizes its sovereign capacities to enable and protect capital accumulation.

In the case of Mostaqbal Misr, the military institution operates as a clearing force, opening the terrain for the expansion of large-scale capitalist agriculture and securing control over land, water, and energy. Agricultural production itself is delegated to major investors, while small-scale producers are excluded on the grounds that they cannot be reconciled with logics of efficiency, scale, and export orientation.

This model is not confined to Mostaqbal Misr. It is replicated in other large reclamation schemes, most notably the “New Egyptian Countryside” project launched in 2021 to reclaim 1.5 million feddans across multiple desert regions, including the New Delta, West Minya and Toshka. The smallest plots offered under this initiative measure approximately 238 feddans—placing them firmly within the reach of medium-sized investors or consortia of capital holders. Exclusion, in this sense, is not an accidental outcome of implementation, but a structural feature embedded in the project’s design.

This configuration departs sharply from the Nasserist agrarian model, which rested on two parallel paths. The first relied on large state farms in Nubariya, which bore a superficial resemblance to Mostaqbal Misr but differed in a fundamental respect: they remained publicly owned, and their production priorities were oriented toward national food self-sufficiency. The second path centered on redistributing expropriated land to small farmers, either through ownership contracts capped at five feddans or through agricultural leases that offered a degree of security and permanence.

The collapse of the last strongholds

Unlike the sweeping reconfiguration of newly reclaimed desert lands, the dismantling of earlier agricultural-land policies did not require a dramatic institutional rupture. It was sufficient to diminish the residual role of the state, liberalize agricultural rents, and withdraw subsidies from production inputs—extending a policy trajectory that began in the late 1970s and has intensified sharply in recent years.

One of the most telling indicators of the commodification of land in the old Valley and Delta is the steady contraction in the size of plots rented by farmers. Holdings that once measured a full feddan, or even half a feddan, have been reduced to plots of roughly one qirat—one twenty-fourth of a feddan. As a result, a single parcel of land is now commonly divided among multiple tenants. This fragmentation reflects rent levels so elevated that the feddan has ceased to function as a viable unit of lease, deepening rural poverty and undermining agricultural stability.

This process has been reinforced by the practices of state institutions themselves, including the Ministries of Agriculture, Water Resources and Irrigation, and Religious Endowments, which have increasingly disposed of their agricultural holdings through market mechanisms. In dealing with these assets, revenue maximization has been elevated to the overriding objective, displacing any consideration of livelihood security or productive sustainability.

The rent pricing on ministry-owned lands illustrates this logic with particular clarity. In 2014, the annual rent for one feddan of Endowments land stood at approximately 500 Egyptian pounds. Within a few years, this figure multiplied several times over. Public controversy erupted again late last year when rents rose in a single leap from 15,000 to 45,000 pounds per feddan.

Letters circulating from farmers leasing Endowments land offer insight into how this rentier logic operates on the ground. In one letter addressed to the Ministry, a farmer disaggregates the cost of cultivating a single feddan item by item, demonstrating that higher rents have rendered farming—particularly the cultivation of staple food crops such as grains—a loss-making activity.

By contrast, the Ministry of Endowments’ official spokesperson has explained that land values are determined according to prevailing market prices in adjacent areas. This so-called comparative market method assesses value on the basis of nearby transactions and comparable plots, rather than on production costs or the farmer’s realized income.

Under this framework, land is treated first and foremost as a financial investment asset rather than as a means of livelihood and production. The sharp rent hikes and the widening gulf between the state’s calculations and the lived realities of small farmers are direct outcomes of this shift.

Agriculture without small farmers

What links the desert and the Valley is displacement. In newly reclaimed lands, small farmers and agricultural graduates are excluded through the very design of the projects themselves. Attempts at autonomous expansion or informal land-use in desert hinterlands are met with sustained campaigns of surveillance and containment—measures that are no longer seasonal, negotiable, or ad hoc.

In lands once shaped by Nasserist policies, soaring rents push farmers to reduce the size of their holdings or exit agriculture altogether, particularly in the absence of contractual security following the liberalization of the old tenancy regime in the 1990s.

Between these two forms of displacement, the space that once allowed for the emergence of small, locally rooted landholders in desert areas, and for the persistence of diverse subsistence-oriented farming in the Valley and Delta, continues to erode. The question, then, is not the “success” or “failure” of any single project. It is the redefinition of agricultural development itself.

Mostaqbal Misr and Egypt’s recent agricultural initiatives no longer conceived agriculture as a means of producing food or securing livelihoods for farmers and rural communities. Instead, it is reconstituted as a domain for asserting control over land, water, and energy, and for managing risk in the interests of large capital through profit-driven, export-oriented production.

The effects of this displacement extend well beyond the boundaries of the fields themselves. The resurgence of labor emigration to Libya, the rise in the number of Egyptians undertaking dangerous crossings of the Mediterranean, and Egypt’s ranking in 2024 as the world’s second-largest source of irregular migration to Europe cannot be understood in isolation from this form of structural violence.

Agrarian displacement translates into social, economic, and even geographic displacement—pushing broad segments of the population to seek survival outside agriculture and beyond national borders, often along highly precarious routes.

Displacement also reshapes agrifood systems. Food crops once cultivated for local and household consumption are increasingly abandoned in favor of export-oriented crops. This shift is not a choice, but an imposed necessity—an attempt to still participate in agriculture under increasingly restrictive and punitive market conditions.

These transformations are routinely presented as hallmarks of modernization and efficiency, wrapped in images of greening landscapes and discourses of achievement. In practice, they amount to a slow dismantling of the countryside’s capacity to reproduce its own social and economic life. Agriculture is converted into an instrument within a broader project of societal and economic reordering.

This is the core of the coercive restructuring of Egyptian agriculture under projects like Mostaqbal Misr: coercion enacted through multiple, intersecting mechanisms, whose cumulative effect is the exclusion of those who actually cultivate the land.