On the twenty-fourth of June 1992, the Egyptian People’s Assembly issued Law No. 96/1992 amending some provisions of Law No. 178/1952. The latter is the first agrarian reform law, and its amendments were officially known as the law regulating the relationship between landlord and tenant in agricultural lands, known among peasants as the law of expelling tenants. The new law gave a five-year deadline that ended on October 1, 1997, the day when about one million families lost land and who, until the law was passed, had enjoyed secure ownership of their land. The overwhelming majority of them were poor small farmers, and by losing land they lost a major source of their livelihood and food security as well.
More than thirty years have passed since the issuance of the law, which is considered one of the most dangerous laws issued during the Mubarak era which had one of the greatest impacts on the lives of a wide segment of the Egyptian people. The law had dire and far-reaching effects, the brunt of which we feel now, although many of us do not realize its relationship to this disastrous law, which is largely responsible for the exacerbation of the problem of rural poverty, unemployment, and the food crisis. The vast majority of tenants relied on the land to ensure their food security, and with the change in the situation, the rental market became open, and the rent rose exorbitantly. In addition, the contracts were not legally registered, but rather the prevailing pattern became rent for a short period of time that could be limited to one agricultural season. As a result, the tenants moved away from growing the main food crops and turned to commercial cash crops with the aim of selling them to pay the exorbitant rent. This is in addition to the dire environmental consequences and damage to the condition of agricultural lands due to the excessive use of chemical fertilizers with the aim of obtaining a larger crop, and the reluctance to use fertilizers that are beneficial to the soil and whose impact is visible only in the long term.
Regulating the relationship between landlord and tenant was part of the first agrarian reform law issued on September 9, 1952, whose importance was not only limited to the redistribution of expropriated lands outside the maximum limit stipulated, but the most important and influential aspect of the law was related to the regulation of tenancy relations.
Over time, the owners complained about the situation, as they were unable, for example, to sell their land laden with permanent tenants at the market price, or to lease it to others informally and at a higher price, as was done by other owners whose lands were not inhabited by “permanent tenants.” The problem was not discussed with any seriousness, and the political forces as a whole did not reject the law, with the exception of the Tagammu’ Party and the Peasants’ Union (under establishment at the time), but their objections went unheeded, although the position of the Tagammu’ Party did not deny the existence of a problem related to the status quo and made serious proposals to deal with it, the most important of which was a proposal establishing a fund to lend to tenants for the purpose of purchasing lands from landlords at a market price, then paying the price in installments over a long period.
The issuance of the law coincided with a period of what is known as the policies of economic liberalization and structural adjustment under the guidance and pressures of the International Monetary Fund, and although the abolition of the rent law and the “liberalization” of the agricultural land market were completely in line with these policies, the law was not motivated by external pressures, but by the internal interests of landlords who wanted to reclaim their land. It is noteworthy that the law was issued by a People’s Assembly filled with landlords and did not have a single tenant member. It is also to be mentioned that the law was issued without any studies and without even having a database on the size of those affected, let alone considering any means to avoid the severe damage that affected them. Instead, government newspapers were employed to exert collective pressure, and Islamic law was also employed, as the Mufti of the Republic and the Sheikh of Al-Azhar were invited to the People’s Assembly session in which the law was discussed, and Fathi Sorour announced that the Mufti and the Sheikh of Al-Azhar decided that the Agrarian Reform Law was invalid by Islamic jurisprudence terms because the lease contracts were of indefinite duration.
It is also worth noting that the same legal principle of respecting the right of ownership, the same economic interest in “liberalizing the market” and the same legal principle of invalidating an indefinite contract, all apply strictly to the situation regarding the rental relationship of housing in major cities, where these dwellings are occupied by permanent tenants who pay low and fixed wages. However, the state did not subject urban residents to the same hardship as it did with rural farmers for two main reasons. The first is that tenants and homeowners do not stand on opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of class status, as is the case in agricultural lands, where a large number of middle-class and wealthy people benefit from the stability of housing rents in cities, in contrast to the situation of agricultural land. The second reason relates to the different nature of protest activity between rural and urban areas, as it is easy for the government to control protests in some villages here or there, but it must take many considerations into account when it comes to urban residents taking to the streets.
Thus, in one fell swoop, nearly 10% of Egypt's population was impoverished and marginalized through mechanisms that the Mubarak regime mastered and used in the same way on many other fronts.
