In 2001 the government tried to encourage farmers to grow cotton again
by contributing around LE176 per feddan to cultivation costs, in addition to
LE100 to fight cotton pests, especially the boll-worm, which had devastated
the harvest of previous years. In 1998/99 the per-feddan yields reached an
unprecedented low of 199 kg of ginned cotton. In 1981/82, the yield had
been 578 kg/feddan (Ministry of Information 2000: 66f ). It is to be expected
that the production of cotton will decline further, especially when government
measures to liberalize the economy become fully effective.
Cotton was not only the raw material that Egypt supplied to the British
cotton industry in colonial times and the country’s first source of hard cur-
rency (and thus also relevant in terms of foreign politics later), it also played
a most important role in the home economy until the end of the 1970s.