Egypt’s Agriculture under Stress
1 Foreign currency versus food security
After having been the backbone of the country’s economy for thousands of
years, agriculture in Egypt has lost its prominent position rapidly during recent
decades, beginning in the 1960s. Nevertheless, this sector of the economy is
still considered an important source of Egypt’s hard currency revenue, and at
the same time is expected to guarantee relative food security for a constantly
growing population. This means that Egypt’s agriculture has to provide high-
quality products for export, and at the same time large amounts of staple
crops to feed the nation. However, as Table 7.3 shows, the contribution of
agriculture to national income fell between 1970/71 and 2000/01 from 29 per
cent to 16.5 per cent. During the same period agrarian production’s propor-
tion of total export value decreased dramatically from 63 per cent to only
8.4 per cent, while the numbers of people employed in agriculture, which
had been 72 per cent of the working population in 1947, dropped from 53
per cent to 28.2 per cent of all persons employed in the country during that
span of time. Egypt’s degree of self-sufficiency in the most important food
items, shown in Table 8.6, is discussed below.