Even after the land reform of 1961 had been carried out, only 43 per cent
of the agricultural land consisted of purely owned holdings; 19.5 per cent
consisted of purely leased holdings and 37.5 per cent of mixed (partly owned
and partly leased) holdings; 88 per cent of tenants paid rent in cash. In the
remaining cases payments were made with parts of the harvest, if no other
arrangements had been agreed on (Abdel-Fadil 1975: 20f ).
In spite of the small sizes of their plots the fellaheen working on rented
land are not the poorest among the rural population. Indeed, the absolutely
poor are the landless fellaheen, who are hardly ever mentioned in the statistics.
According to El-Khyar (1982, cited in Abdel-Moiti and Kishk 1992: 223) their
number amounted to 59.3 per cent of the rural population in 1950 before the
first land reform, and decreased to 37.8 per cent in 1976. Their proportion is
likely to be at least 30 per cent today, although according to official data they
constituted only 14 per cent in 1985–87 (Ministry of Agriculture and Land
Reclamation 1991: 24). The majority of them procure a living for the families
by working as farm labourers. Renting land is completely out of their reach,
especially since 1997, when rents were raised all over the country with the
effects described above.