Alan Richards – författare

One of the most serious problems facing the Middle East and North Africa · is the region's growing inability to feed its expanding population. Rapidly escalating demand has made the region highly dependent on food imports, and policy initiatives intended to increase domestic production have met with mixed success at best. The contributors to this volume examine the historical origins of state policies toward agriculture, recent policy changes and their effects on domestic supply, and the social and political implications of these shifts. Focusing on the region's largest agricultural economies, contributors analyze Turkey's strong performance as well as Egypt's weak response to its agricultural problems. Pricing, investment strategies, irrigation policies, and the impact of large-scale labor migration on agricultural sectors are discussed, and a common theme of the interplay between politics and economics runs throughout.

After a long period of stability, Egypt’s agricultural sector experienced sudden change due to the 1973 oil price increases and Anwar Sadat’s Open Door economic policies. Workers left rural Egypt for the cities and high-wage jobs in the oil-exporting countries. The resulting “labor shortage†and rising real wages in agriculture coincided with a massive U.S. foreign assistance program that has been encouraging the rapid mechanization of Egyptian agriculture. This book examines changes in agricultural labor markets and farm technology in Egypt during the last, decade, focusing especially on the social consequences and long-term prospects of mechanization.

One of the principal factors underlying Anwar Sadat's willingness to sign a peace treaty with Israel was the deplorable state of the Egyptian economy. Multiplying shortages, deteriorating infrastructures, and spiraling foreign debts fill the economic news from Egypt. A central component of this domestic crisis is agriculture. Agriculture forms the basis for a vast portion of the Egyptian economy, accounting for nearly half the country's employment and nearly a third of its gross national product, as well as providing materials for over half of its industry. This book describes and interprets the transformation of Egyptian agriculture from the beginning of cotton cultivation in the early nineteenth century to the current changes under Sadat. The author uses both microeconomic theory and social and political analysis to show how the interaction of social classes, technical change, government policy, and the international and state systems have shaped Egypt's agricultural development. Arguing that these forces are bound up in a complex web of reciprocal causation, he places the current dilemmas of Egyptian agriculture in historical perspective.

One of the most serious problems facing the Middle East and North Africa · is the region's growing inability to feed its expanding population. Rapidly escalating demand has made the region highly dependent on food imports, and policy initiatives intended to increase domestic production have met with mixed success at best. The contributors to this volume examine the historical origins of state policies toward agriculture, recent policy changes and their effects on domestic supply, and the social and political implications of these shifts. Focusing on the region's largest agricultural economies, contributors analyze Turkey's strong performance as well as Egypt's weak response to its agricultural problems. Pricing, investment strategies, irrigation policies, and the impact of large-scale labor migration on agricultural sectors are discussed, and a common theme of the interplay between politics and economics runs throughout.

This book addresses the impact of labor emigration, the structure and functioning of agricultural labor markets, and the causes and consequences of farm mechanization in Egypt. It argues that agricultural mechanization and government policy are very closely intertwined.

This book uses both microeconomic theory and social and political analysis to show how the interaction of social classes, technical change, government policy, and the international and state systems have shaped Egypt's agricultural development.

A Political Economy of the Middle East is the most comprehensive analysis of developments in the political economy of the region over the past several decades, examining the interaction of economic development processes, state systems and policies, and social actors in the Middle East.The fourth edition, with new authors Melani Cammett and Ishac Diwan, has been thoroughly revised, with two new introductory chapters that provide an updated framework with which to understand and study the many changes in demography, education, labour markets, urbanization, water and agriculture, and international labour migration in the recent years. The new edition also includes: a new chapter that charts the political economy of the Gulf states and, in particular, the phenomenal growth of oil economies a new chapter on the rise of "crony capitalism" and increased coverage of the changes in civil society and social movements in the region, including an exploration of the causes, dynamics, consequences, and aftermath of the Arab uprisings.