Guest post by Laura Wilson
By focusing attention on a single but critical resource, Jessica Barnes sheds light on the complexities of social, economic, and political change in rural Egypt. The resource is water.
Barnes is currently completing her doctorate in Columbia University’s new multidisciplinary Ph.D. program in Sustainable Development. She combines training and perspectives in cultural anthropology, geography, and environmental science to understand the multifaceted world of water in a context where rainfall is extremely scarce and farmers depend on the flow of one river and its tributaries. Her mantra is: follow the water.
In a presentation at the Elliott School of International Affairs on January 27, Barnes described the findings from her research in Egypt on land reclamation from the desert for farming (she focused on the areas around Fayoum). The Egyptian government promotes land reclamation in order to help the country achieve food self-sufficiency and to create agricultural jobs for college graduates who cannot be absorbed by the civil service.
Barnes finds that the new farmers are successful in the “greening” of desert land, and much desert land is now producing food. But such expansion of farming requires water. Reclamation projects are located further from the Nile and its tributaries than the plots of longstanding farmers. Gaining access to irrigation water is difficult, so many new farmers resort to illegal means to obtain water for their farms. Barnes showed a photograph of one farmer’s illegal pipeline.
Long-term farmers said that their lands are no longer productive because the water they normally depend on is being diverted to the reclamation areas. Barnes links this pattern to what David Harvey refers to as “accumulation by dispossession.” The new farmers reclaim land from the desert and earn profits, but they simultaneously deprive long-term farmers of their livelihood. The long-term farmers are forced to abandon their nonproductive land.
Barnes’ ethnographic focus on water, augmented by her use of GIS mapping and long-term multi-level fieldwork, is an excellent example of how a resource-centered approach can yield rich insights of value to international development and environmental policy and programs.
Laura Wilson is a candidate for an M.A. degree in International Development Studies at George Washington University with a focus on gender, human rights, and development. She received a B.S. degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 2007. She is currently the program assistant for the International Development Studies program.
Image: “Egyptian stuff BW” from flickr user Richard Messenger, licensed with Creative Commons.
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