Now they usually change tenants annually. This practice will ultimately lead
to adverse consequences, because under such insecure conditions tenants will
not invest in soil improvement, but will rather practise strip mining. Both the
new tenants and the old ones, if they are able to pay the inflated land rents,
are hardly able to make ends meet. To illustrate this, we give the example of
a tenant from Abu Qurqas, El Minya Governorate. He was able to keep his
1 feddan after agreeing to pay LE1,800 annual rent. In 2000 he grew wheat in
winter, followed by maize in summer. His harvest was 2.5 tons of wheat and
2.7 tons of maize. He sold about 80 per cent of it for LE2,300 and kept the
rest to be consumed by his family. After paying rent and deducting the costs
of seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, hardly any cash profit was made, while he
and his family had worked hard all year without pay. However, he did make
the following subsidiary gains:
A tenant’s subsidiary gains
Food for family consumption 1 ton of wheat and maize
various vegetables grown around the fields
Fodder for two sheep, a donkey and straw from the wheat harvested
a cow:
Fuel: stalks and inner cones of the maize
harvested
Occasional small cash income: from selling sheep from time to time
from selling butter made from the cow’s
milk
Source: Fieldwork F. Ibrahim 2000, Abu Qurqas, El Minya Governorate
It is certain, however, that the same fellaheen family fared much better before
1997 when the land rent was less than one-third of what it is now.