Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring

By Rami Zurayk

The wave of anti-government protests that swept through the Arab world from December 2010 on started to transform politics and society in the Middle East. The protests came as a surprise to many observers-- but not to Rami Zurayk, an veteran Lebanese agronomist and social activist who had been analyzing the collapse of traditional agricultural livelihoods in the Middle East since the late 1980s. In 2007, Zurayk started writing the "Land and People" blog, which charts food-policy and agricultural policy issues throughout the Middle East. Food, Farming, and Freedom presents his choice of the best of the posts in the blog from 2007 through April 2011. It concludes with a chapter tracking the early months of the Arab Spring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Just World Books
• Release date: May 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781935982142

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All text and photographs, © 2011 Rami Zurayk. Materials originally published in Arabic by Al-Akhbar (Beirut) have been translated by the author and are republished with the permission of Al-Akhbar. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or trasmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes. visit our website at www.justworldbooks.com,

Second printing, 2011.

Overall book design by Lewis Rector for Just World Publishing, LLC. Typesetting and design of chapter headings by Jane Sickon for Just World Publishing, LLC.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication

(Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)

Zurayk, Rami.

     Food, farming, and freedom : sowing the Arab spring /

by Rami Zurayk.

p. cm.

LCCN 2011920665

ISBN-13: 978-1-935982-05-0

ISBN-10: 1-935982-05-2

     1. Agriculture and state--Arab countries. 2. Land use—Arab countries. 3. Arab countries—Politics and government. I. Title.

HD2114.Z8Z87 2011          330.956

                                   QBI11-600032

To the memory of those who have fallen in the Arab Spring

Contents

Foreword by Rashid Khalidi

Author’s Introduction

1.     Food Sovereignty, Politics, and War

Travels, Part 1: Around Lebanon

2.     The Food Crisis of 2007–2008: Lebanese and Arab Perspectives

Travels, Part II: Erbil, Kurdistan Province, Iraq

3.     Environment, Resources, and People

Travels, Part III: Aleppo, Syria

4.     Disillusionment in Development

Travels, Part IV: Damascus and the Jabal al `Arab, Syria

5.     The Arab Uprisings

Glossary

Acknowledgments

Foreword

It is very appropriate that Rami Zurayk’s Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring should appear at a moment when the entire Arab world is being shaken by an upheaval directed against, among other things, the global neoliberal economic order that is one of this book’s main targets. For this neoliberal order, notably as it affects issues of Arab agriculture and food production, is at the heart of Zurayk’s concerns.

Zurayk focuses on a broad range of issues, particularly in his native Lebanon but also in the wider Arab world. Among them are the predicament of the declining Arab agricultural sector, the problem of food insecurity, and the precarious plight of the Arab small farmer. Another target of this book is Israel’s depredations against Lebanon for more than 40 years, which have devastated in particular the Lebanese South, where Zurayk himself is from. As an agronomist and a south Lebanese native, he is well placed to chronicle the impact of the depopulation, attacks on infrastructure, and other torments that the Israeli military has repeatedly visited on southern Lebanon—torments that he appropriately links to those inflicted on the Palestinians for more than 60 years. Still, as Zurayk points out, in spite of his scathing critique of what Israeli aggression has done to Lebanon, the country’s own political system has been the main agent of destruction of rural society and landscape, through its blind adoption of the most extreme version of the market fundamentalist creed.

This is typical of this book’s unrelenting critique of the profound flaws of the sectarian Lebanese political system, both of whose main competing factions, he notes repeatedly, are dominated by the interests of the rich, in spite of their many apparent differences. Zurayk’s concentration on these internal factors is in keeping with the primarily inward-directed emphasis of the revolts, uprisings, and revolutions that have constituted the Arab Spring of 2011 which has so far toppled two Arab autocrats and threatened the absolute power of many others. As befits the postcolonial age in which the Arab peoples find themselves, the revolutionaries who have animated this Arab Spring have concentrated mainly on the problems of their own societies. As the whole world has been aware, their aspirations include achieving democratic governance, the adoption of constitutional systems, the establishment of the rule of law, and social justice for peoples who for so long have been denied all these things by their rulers.

Less noticed, by most of the Western media at least, has been the constant stress of these revolutionaries on the socioeconomic conditions fostered by the neoliberal world order and its ever-pliant acolytes in the Arab elites: the weakening of the role of the state in the economy and the consequent decline of education and decay of national infrastructure; the degradation of the social safety net and the gradual elimination of subsidies; the pressure for increased productivity combined with declining wages and skyrocketing profits; the banning or harassment of workers’ unions by the state; privatizations of elements of the public sector in ways that egregiously favor the cronies of those in power; and pervasive nepotism, corruption, and favoritism. Several of the regimes that followed those policies and have been the targets of the wave of Arab revolutions—most notably, those in Tunisia and Egypt—were previously considered poster children of reform or structural adjustment by the high priests of the free market at the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and USAID.

Zurayk’s main concern is the specific ways in which governmental policies tailored to the dictates of this neoliberal order have helped to degrade agriculture, rural livelihoods, and the environment, both in Lebanon and in other Arab countries. The blog posts collated in this volume cover a wide range of topics, but most of them circle back to emphasize how governmental policies tailored to free trade, that encourage agricultural exports by big producers at the expense of small ones and the unrestricted import of lavishly subsidized American and European agricultural products, have helped to impoverish Lebanese and other Arab farmers. Zurayk makes the important point that what is at stake is not just some romantic vision of the small farmer, but rather protection of the environment, of the aesthetic nature of the countryside, of a healthy and delicious local cuisine, and of an entire way of life. Anyone who recalls the unspoiled green hills and mountains to the northeast, east, and southeast of Beirut as recently as 20 years ago, compared with the hideously scarred, built-up panorama of today, will understand why Zurayk is so scathing about the Lebanese model of laissez-faire, private-sector–driven development focusing on untrammeled real-estate speculation and the absence of any state control or regulation, or any concern for ecology or the environment.

In Lebanon and many other Arab countries, this speculation has taken large amounts of agricultural land out of production, deprived many small farmers of their livelihoods, and driven them to join the ranks of the deprived urban poor who helped make the Arab revolutions of 2011. Zurayk is thus introducing the reader to a whole range of phenomena relating to agriculture, land, and ecology that are little known but are central to the astonishing events that have taken place over the last few months in one Arab country after another. He shows clearly that what was at stake for Arab farmers, and for the millions of others in the Arab world who were the direct victims of the policies produced by local elites in keeping with the neoliberal tenets of the Washington consensus, was more than their livelihoods: It was also their dignity.

It was no coincidence that the watchword of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and of many of the other Arab uprisings that followed, was karama (Arabic for dignity). What the young revolutionaries who braved the brutality of Ben ‘Ali and Mubarak’s riot police, secret police, and organized thugs were calling for was probably in the first place the dignity of the individual. They affirmed this individual dignity in the face of brutal authoritarian regimes that denied the worth of each and every citizen—and treated them as if they had no dignity. But it was not just the myriad personal humiliations inflicted by the henchmen of these regimes that these revolutions were responding to, and it was not just the dignity of the individual they were defending. It was also the dignity of the collective, the dignity of an entire people humiliated by servile Arab rulers who bowed and scraped to their Western and Israeli betters, submissively following both their dictates in foreign policy and the economic nostrums that made a narrow Arab elite fabulously wealthy but impoverished wider and wider strata of their peoples.

The spirit of resistance to the personal and collective impositions of the decadent regimes of the Arab world on the personal and collective dignity of their citizens has burned brightly since the young Tunisian vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself afire in mid-December 2010. Through his careful and detailed examinations of food and farming issues in Lebanon and other Arab countries, Zurayk helps us to understand where this flame comes from. He also shows how it is directly related to a broader spirit of resistance to the economic and political impositions of outside powers that have an unlimited desire to dominate the crucial strategic space and vast energy resources of this region.

The Arab revolutions and uprisings have thus far been directed mainly at curing the profound ills of Arab societies and Arab governance systems. They have been based on a strong understanding on the part of those who have launched and led them that even where external powers have aided and abetted the regimes that have plagued the Arab world for decades, the real disease was an Arab one: a disease of Arab elites and Arab autocrats. These revolutionaries realized that it could only be cured by looking inward and diagnosing and treating this internal disease, rather than by blaming outside forces. While the outside forces enabled their Arab client regimes, and benefited handsomely from their subservience, the root of the problem lay at home, not abroad. In Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring, Rami Zurayk has made a major contribution to our understanding of the roots of this unprecedented upsurge of Arab youth, Arab energy, and Arab political maturity.

Rashid Khalidi

Columbia University

May 5, 2011

Author’s Introduction

On December 17, 2010, in the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, a 26-year-old vegetable vendor called Mohamed Bouazizi, driven to desperation by the harassment of the local authorities, doused himself in gasoline and set fire to himself. Bouazizi, the sole breadwinner for his mother and five sisters, took three weeks to die. His tragic act sparked a rapid and mounting series of protests—and numerous copycat actions of self-immolation—in countries throughout the Arab world. In mid-January 2011, the protests forced Tunisia’s longtime dictator, Washington’s close ally President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, to flee the country. On February 11, 2011, protesters in Egypt forced an even more crucial U.S. ally, Hosni Mubarak, to end his 30 years as president abruptly. During the weeks that followed, large-scale antigovernment protests rocked Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and Syria; smaller protests were seen in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Morocco, and Algeria. In Libya, many antigovernment protesters took up arms. After Muammar el-Qaddafi sent his military to try to crush them, the United States, some of its European allies, and the U.S.-backed governments of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates used a deadly mix of missiles and airpower to suppress Qaddafi’s air defenses and also—as several Western leaders openly stated—to try to topple his government from power.

The size and power of the protests that followed Bouazizi’s self-immolation showed that by the end of 2010, massive numbers of citizens of Arab countries were deeply dissatisfied with governments that had all (with the partial exception of Syria) been strongly supported by the United States and whose militaries and economies had all been closely integrated into the U.S.-led New World Order. The popular movements that erupted during what Rashid Khalidi and others have called the Arab Spring had many attributes in common. They relied on a large degree of popular self-organization, often using web-based social media and cellphones, which was undertaken largely outside the framework of existing political parties. The protesting activists stated loudly and often that a key aim was to restore their national dignity and ensure that their governments would be responsive to their own citizens rather than the diktats of foreign governments or Western-dominated financial institutions. There was a strong sense of pan-Arab solidarity among the activists, along with support for Palestinian rights and a keen sense that one of the key shortcomings of their previous governments had been the degree to which they kowtowed to Washington and Israel. And the protests often started—as in Tunisia—in smaller towns or in the sprawling new exurbs clustered around the capital cities: the kinds of places to which Arab families displaced from the countryside by the collapse of rural livelihoods were forced to settle in the desperate hope they could eke out some kind of a different living there. And all this had been happening in the very lands where, 10 millennia ago, farming first began. . . .

I watched the eruption of these protests with great interest. By the end of 2010, I had been working professionally on rural development matters in the Arab world for more than a quarter of a century. I had been deeply involved in studying the agricultural and land-use systems in most of the countries where the protests were erupting. Often, I had to watch with dismay as projects I worked on, which were designed to sustain rural livelihoods, were driven to failure by government policies that systematically favored the importation of agricultural products that had received stunningly large subsidies from the governments of the United States or the European Union, whereas local producers received no such help. I understood very deeply what was forcing these Arab women and men to revolt.

This book was born in the forge of the Israeli war on Lebanon of July–August 2006. I am a citizen of the Arab country of Lebanon: My father’s home-village of Sinay lies in South Lebanon, an area that has been the victim of repeated acts of Israeli aggression, invasion, and occupation since 1978. When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert launched the war of 2006, he used as a pretext the fact that fighters from the Lebanese resistance organization Hizbullah had slipped across the border into Israel and captured two Israeli military men with the goal of exchanging them for some of the many Lebanese and Palestinian citizens whom Israel had been illegally holding for many years. But the Israeli attack on Lebanon that ensued had clearly been prepared and held in waiting for a long time before it was launched; its broad and deadly scope, as well as the declarations of its leaders, showed that the principal war aim was to bully the Lebanese citizenry into turning against both Hizbullah itself and the spirit of national independence and nationalist resistance that it represented.

During the 33 days that the 2006 war lasted, Israel used huge amounts of U.S.-supplied weaponry, killing more than 1,400 people in Lebanon (most of them civilians) and destroying the whole, heavily populated Dahiyeh area of southern Beirut along with numerous pieces of vital national infrastructure including bridges, roads, power stations, and factories. But the assault failed to turn the Lebanese people against the Resistance. Quite the opposite. When a ceasefire finally went into place on August 14, 2006, the Resistance was still intact. Its sheer survival against such overwhelming military odds earned it the respect of a large majority of Lebanon’s (usually very deeply divided) people and strong accolades from publics right across the Arab world.

This outcome also confirmed that the weak do not have to remain so forever and that it is possible, with the appropriate preparation and alliances, to defy the dominant system successfully. For those among us who had become disillusioned and had stopped believing in the effectiveness of fighting the imperial ogre and the possibility of reversing the balance of power, this was a major lesson.

I had been an active member of the Lebanese Left since my student days. But the 15 years after 1991 had been a difficult period for many Leftists, in Lebanon as in the rest of the Arab world. Many among us awoke during the early 1990s to the reality that very little remained of the leftwing movements that had been such a feature of Lebanese political life in earlier decades. We realized that, with our country still reeling from the civil war that had plagued it since 1975, no effective state authority existed in Lebanon around which, or against which, one could regroup. Also, a large part of South Lebanon was still groaning under the Israeli military occupation that had started in 1982 . . . and the most effective resistance to the occupation forces turned out to be that organized by Hizbullah, which had long been in a relationship of ideological rivalry with most of the Lebanese Left. Syrian forces controlled most of the north and center of our country; their intelligence services, the mukhabarat, were deeply infiltrated into its political, intellectual, and social fabric, ready to inflict severe punishment onto any person or group that threatened their domination.

A Lebanese state was being slowly brought back to life—but its midwives were Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. The prime minister throughout most of the years 1992 through 2004 was Lebanese-Saudi businessman Rafic Hariri, who presented himself as a thoroughly modern political philanthropist, a captain of good hope eager to steer the country into the age of globalization.

For us Lebanese leftists, the mood seemed matte black as pop postmodernist thought, accompanied by a pervasive spirit of individualism, came to us through the Internet, cell phones, and satellite television. Globalization was the new religion. Neoliberalism was taking over our lives and becoming a culture (though we did not even know what to call it yet.) In Washington, D.C., by 1993, veteran Palestinian leader yasser Arafat was kissing Israeli Prime Minister yitzhak Rabin.

Against this background, what could the Lebanese leftists and social justice activists do? Many turned to social work and labored within nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civil movements. This activism was perceived as a way to remain in touch with some of the former ideals without posing a direct threat to the dominant power structures. Many abandoned political action and joined the business community, where the critical thinking skills they had developed over years of debating and polemicizing brought many of them great success. Others joined the ranks of the dominant system and became acolytes in the great neoliberal rebirth. yet others retreated back into their professions and focused on their inner comfort circles: family, work, and career. A minority joined the ranks of the Islamic Resistance and continued to struggle against the Israeli occupier.

My own choice in those years was the first of those scenarios. I had received a Ph.D. in plant science from Oxford in 1989, and soon thereafter started teaching in the much-respected Agriculture Department of the American University of Beirut. Throughout the 1990s, I threw myself even more deeply into the challenge of rural development, working with a variety of Western NGOs and intergovern-mental organizations in most of the Arab countries—from Algeria to Bahrain, from Syria to Yemen. But until 2006, I remained pragmatic and docile in that work, following the terms of reference and operating to the left of the narrow margin allowed by such institutions as the World Bank or the United Nations. Without thinking about it much, I was helping to create parallel structures to the public sector, which contributed to weakening it. I championed civil society and especially NGOs as an alternative to states. I liberally used the same vocabulary in which the New Middle East was being coated—governance, democracy, freedom, and empowerment—to achieve the projects’ aims and objectives. In short, I never harmonized my politics with my profession. I thought radically about politics but acted tamely in my profession.

And then Israel launched its assault on my country in 2006.

That attack brought many of us leftists back onto the political track. During the war, many of us spontaneously got together and organized relief operations for the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Dahiyeh and South Lebanon. Our work did not end when the bombs stopped falling; at that point, we immediately moved to South Lebanon to aid the reconstruction efforts there. The Land and People project, which was the framework within which I later launched the Land and People blog, grew out of that postwar effort. The Land and People project started out as a mobile agricultural clinic designed to help small producers rebuild the livelihoods that Israel’s assault had shattered.

These post-2006 efforts allowed me the opportunity to align my work with my values. I remained averse to any sectarian dimension to the struggle for social justice. But with the deeper understanding of the concept of the balance of power that I now had, I had enough courage to start working on changing it. I unearthed Antonio Gramsci’s model of the organic intellectual and endorsed it. For the first time in my life, my professional commitments as an academic, an agriculturalist, and a rural development specialist came to be aligned with my political action.

I was certainly not the only Arab person inspired by the success of the Lebanese Resistance in 2006. The Resistance’s victory sent waves of hope and pride throughout the Arab World. We stopped being a people who knew only defeat, and we became a people with dignity. The Resistance became the hero of all the Arabs who had followed Israel’s defeat at the hands of a group of committed, devoted, and organized people armed with World War II weaponry. Suddenly, we believed that anything was possible. We recovered some of the dignity and pride that had been seriously eroded by many decades of living under dictatorships subservient to the Empire and its enforcer, Israel.

When I started the Land and People blog, I had two main purposes in mind. One was to document the evolution of my thought on this journey toward becoming an organic intellectual, defined not by my words alone but also by my matching deeds. The other was to serve as an aggregator of information related to the links between food, farming, rural society, and politics. This goal was important in helping to share knowledge of a subject that is of crucial importance to the Arab region but remains largely under-studied: food politics and its relationship to power.

Our region’s relationship with food and food production is weighted with paradoxes: This is where agriculture emerged, 10,000 years ago, and this is where most important crop and animal species originate. yet today, we are the world’s largest importers of food, and more than 50 percent of the calories we consume are imported! We are major producers of the oil and phosphorus without which modern food production cannot take place. yet, we are kept hostage to the vagaries of the food market because we export these crucial commodities on terms dictated by the Western countries and import so much of our food on their terms too! Our population is growing fast: youth make up half the population. But these are mostly unemployed, and the farm sector is in disarray. The urban centers are swelling with poor people trying to escape rural poverty. Most of the countries of the region have been ruled by dictators allied with rich entrepreneurs. These dictators imposed on their peoples a rent economy that provided them with rapid profits, at the expense of the productive sectors—especially agriculture.

The food crisis of 2007–2008 showed the region’s vulnerability to food shortages. Riots erupted, leaving dozens of dead and injured. Arab governments responded with some short-term measures that included stockpiling and subsidies. These were widely thought to be insufficient. Then, in the last months of 2010, after a 2-year lull, world food prices started rising again. The whole world was bracing itself for a new food crisis. . . .

This book is a compilation of, primarily, my blog posts related to the politics of food and to the relation between ecology, resources, sovereignty and farming, and the emergence of the Arab Spring. I raise issues that are related to the survival of small farmers and other food producers in a system that tries very hard to eradicate them. The blog posts, which are organized chronologically in each chapter, show the evolution of my thinking over time. Some of the early writings sound overly candid to me today, as if I were trying to convince the dominant system of the need and importance of recognizing the relevance and the potential of the marginalized. With time, my discourse became more radical, as I come back to the conclusion to which I cyclically return: that nothing will work short of a systemic revolution and that one cannot humanize the neoliberal, free market–based system. Over time, I also started to post Arabic-language pieces on the blog. These were mostly the editorial pieces I wrote weekly starting in October 2007 for the food and farming page of Al Akhbar, a broad-circulation Lebanese newspaper representing the resistant Left. I have included my translations of several of these articles in this book.

The book is divided into five chapters. The first and longest addresses issues of food sovereignty and politics. The second focuses on the food-price crisis of 2007– 2008 and how it affected Arab countries, foreshadowing many of the challenges that beset Arab publics even more harshly in late 2010. Chapter 3 tackles issues at the nexus of environment, resources, and people, including phenomena such as the Slow Food movement with which I have been affiliated since 2006. Chapter 4 is mostly a critique of development, aid, and the role of NGOs and civil society as they impinge on agriculture and environment. Finally, the last chapter is a collection of posts and articles I wrote between December 2010 and April 2011 in which I relate the story of the Arab Spring as I lived it in Beirut. Interleaved between these chapters is a series of travel reports from trips I took in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Morocco, during which I sought to learn more about—and enjoy—the land, the people, and the food.

Most of the text here focuses on Lebanon. (The strongly free-market underpinnings of its economy stand in many ways as an instructive paradigm of the kinds of policies that the Washington Consensus sought to impose on all the other Arab countries, indeed, all the countries of the global South.) But I have also included material about Palestine, Syria, Jordan and, to a lesser extent, Iraq. These are the Arab countries of the Fertile Crescent, and they exist in a social, geographic, and political continuum; however, in the early 20th century, Western pressure and Arab foolishness succeeded in separating them from each other. But the future of food in this region cannot be addressed without moving back toward the organic integration of the countries of the Fertile Crescent—which are also, as I noted, the countries where farming first began. This, I hope, will be the true outcome of the Arab Spring.

Rami Zurayk

Beirut

April 13, 2011

Chapter 1

Food Sovereignty, Politics, and War

Food is a critical issue in the Arab World, an issue that could have tremendous political leverage, especially in times of crisis. The region faces huge food-security challenges. Chronic aridity severely curtails agriculture, making it one of the most food-insecure regions of the world. Most Arab countries import at least 50 percent of their calorie needs, representing between 11 and 34 percent of total goods imported.¹ Poverty rates are also high, with more than 25 percent of the people subsisting on less than $2 a day except in the Gulf States. Poverty is mostly rural, with 76 percent of the poor living in rural areas.² The poor of the Arab World, similarly to those of other countries of the so-called Developing World, lack education, control little land and capital and have a below average nutritional status.³ Population growth is rapid. Political instability and conflicts continue to plague a large number of countries, further undermining food security. Moreover, most Arab countries score very low on food sovereignty, as most of their food, especially their staples, originate from imports; and market forces rather than policy shape their food systems.

Lebanon shares many of these characteristics.