Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa

"Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is a timely and powerful contribution that helps us understand the socio-ecological fragility of the region. It locates current and speculative food crisis within debates of agrarian transformations and food systems. It fills a gap in critical agrarian studies given that discussions on the relation between the political economy of agriculture, farming and food security in the MENA region have been nearly absent from critical agrarian debates in leading peasant studies journals". — Yasmine Moataz Ahmed (2020): Food insecurity and revolution in the Middle East and North Africa: agrarian questions in Egypt and Tunisia, The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2020.1846673

Climate and Capitalism

Examines the political economy of agrarian transformation with case studies of Egypt and Tunisia. The authors explore the continued failure of post-uprising counter-revolutionary governments to directly address issues of rural development that put the position and role of small farmers centre stage

‘Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa is a powerful corrective to conventional wisdom that small-scale farming systems are unable to anchor meaningful and sustaining development paths. Invoking recurrent peasant resistances in Egypt and Tunisia, Habib Ayeb and Ray Bush assess the impacts of global value relations and imperial ideologies of “food security” on state formation, land politicisation and agrarian underdevelopment.’ — Philip McMichael, Author of Food Regimes and Agrarian Questions

This book definitively rescues the question of food security from apolitical, neoliberal discourse by offering solid and long-awaited critical class analysis of the agrarian question in two most important countries in the region. A classic.' — Maha Abdelrahman, Reader in Development Studies and Middle East Politics, University of Cambridge, UK

‘This is an important and innovative book highlighting the importance of the agrarian question in the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Offering a systematic critique of food security policies, Ayeb and Bush meticulously describe uneven rural development and point, convincingly, to food sovereignty as an alternative. A must-read!’ — Sami Zemni, Professor of Political and Social Sciences, Centre for Conflict and Development Studies, University of Ghent, Belgium

In Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa, Habib Ayeb and Ray Bush undertake the ambitious project of surveying and analyzing data on agrarian systems in Egypt and Tunisia from the 1800s to the present moment. The book will be particularly useful for students and scholars in Middle Eastern area studies, history, or political science who want to incorporate food and agricultural systems into their understandings of the MENA. This book would be an appropriate core text in an undergraduate survey course on political economy in the MENA. It could also provide important supplements to undergraduate and graduate food studies courses, which often focus on the United States, Mexico, and western Europe, by introducing topics of food insecurity, food sovereignty, and agricultural policies in the MENA. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2020.094.039

In Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa, Habib Ayeb and Ray Bush undertake the ambitious project of surveying and analyzing data on agrarian systems in Egypt and Tunisia from the 1800s to the present moment. They argue that policies on farming and agriculture, both in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and internationally, often occlude farmers’ voices, and that Egypt and Tunisia have been incorporated into the world economy in ways that have negatively affected small-scale farmers. A focus on export-driven economies, cash and monocropping, nationalization and collectivization of agricultural land, and adjustment programs driven by international financial institutions, especially the World Bank and USAID, undermine family farms and peasant livelihoods in Egypt and Tunisia. - Jennifer R. Shutek, New York University, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development. Volume 9, Issue 4, Summer 2020, pp 343 - 346.