For Egypt’s agriculture not only the structure of land ownership, but
also the structure of landholdings is of great relevance. A landholding is the
operational unit of farming. It consists of the land owned and the addition-
ally rented land, minus the leased-out land. In 1977/78 there were in Egypt
3.38 million landowners with 3 million landholdings divided between 14 mil-
lion land parcels (Commander 1987: 9; CAPMAS 1988a: 64ff; Hamdan 1984a:
405). Only 14.3 per cent of all landholdings consisted of an undivided land
parcel, while 45 per cent of landholdings consisted of four land parcels or
more. Besides the reasons for extreme land partitioning already mentioned,
absenteeism is also responsible, while at the same time much land is being let
because of the small size of the different parcels. Land leasing has a tradition
in Egypt. It started in the nineteenth century when large estates were given
to members of the ruling class of Ottoman descent. These landlords were
no farmers but stood at the top of a hierarchy that had developed over time
and consisted of a system of tenants and sub-tenants by which the latifundia
were divided into operational sizes. The smallholders at the bottom of this
hierarchical system were usually left in a dreary economic situation with less
than 25 per cent of the gains made through their work to keep as their own.