Contenu du sommaire : Agriculture et politique : des champs d'insécurité

At the heart of major agricultural development projects, the lands of the Egyptian desert are resources coveted by a variety of actors, who project themselves on these spaces and seek to assert their respective interests: produce and market agricultural products of course, but also increase their power or legitimize their position. Inseparable from the process of desert reclamation since Nasser's time, the role of the armed forces has been strongly reaffirmed in recent years, with the coming to power of President Sissi and the project to reclaim 1.5 million feddans. This article questions the place of the army and its interests in the construction and development of a new agricultural frontier in Egypt.

In the aftermath of the 2011 popular revolt, the Tunisian countryside witnessed major mobilizations around access to land, which often took violent forms. They demonstrate the exacerbation of conflicts between actors of the agricultural world with divergent interests. They also reveal new opportunities for groups hitherto marginalized by public policies and trade union action. With a focus on mobilizations around agricultural land, this article explores the issues at stake for various actors (landless farmers, agricultural workers, etc.). The strategies and forms of action deployed by the latter and the confrontations they generate illustrate the socio-political reconfigurations at work since 2011 and highlight the paradoxes of the post-revolution processes in Tunisia.

Agricultural land, which is a strategic factor for food security, require an optimal protection ensured by clear legal mechanism. In Algeria, land security becomes problematic since access to land, and to any other resource, is dictated by parameters other than rationality. The political power in Algeria is very much concerned with its perpetuation since the Independence. It uses land rent in its own interest in its relationship with the population. Throughout the various land and agrarian reforms, land distribution has always been done according to political patronage.

L'entrée en vigueur de la directive cadre européenne sur l'eau en 2000 a compliqué le partage de l'eau en Espagne entre les différentes régions et usagers. La mise en place d'objectifs environnementaux et durables pour sa gestion remet en cause la planification hydrologique espagnole, historiquement fondée sur une augmentation de l'offre d'eau dans des territoires menacés par la pénurie. La sécurité hydrique devient de plus en plus sensible dans plusieurs bassins versants, et l'agriculture, principal secteur visé par ces politiques, est confrontée à de nombreux défis. Le pouvoir conféré aux régions, issues du régime d'autonomie, les rivalités politiques et les hésitations des irrigants envers les postulats européens sur l'eau compliquent la tâche pour renverser ces déséquilibres.

Les six pays des Balkans de l'Ouest (Albanie, Bosnie Herzégovine, Macédoine, Monténégro, Serbie, et Kosovo), après près de vingt ans de « dé-collectivisation », allient une taille modeste, une économie fragile et une agriculture encore fortement présente. Mais la situation de celle-ci demeure préoccupante. À la croisée des évènements historiques et politiques de cette zone, l'agriculture a connu de fortes évolutions tant sur le plan des structures de production que sur son rôle dans l'économie. Aujourd'hui, la très forte proportion des exploitations de petite dimension, leur insertion dans l'environnement, leur multifonctionnalité, pourraient en faire un atout pour la sécurité alimentaire de ces pays. Malheureusement, la désorganisation des filières agricoles, conjuguée à des politiques agricoles qui se tournent plutôt vers le schéma de modernisation que propose l'Union Européenne, semblent annoncer des conséquences plutôt désastreuses qui pourraient faire de l'agriculture un obstacle au développement durable.

The Orontes Basin, a Baath Party's rural stronghold in the 1960s and 1970s, was a protest hotspot in 2011 and 2012. The erosion of the rural base of the Ba'athist regime can be explained by the deep agricultural crisis affecting more particularly the irrigated schemes developed at the beginning of the Baath area. Liberalization in the 2000s is generally considered to be one of the triggers of the Syrian crisis. In the case of the irrigated schemes of the Orontes basin, the situation seems more complex. The centralized planning of production was indeed largely maintained until the beginning of the uprising. First signs of the crisis appeared in the Al Ghab plain in the early 1980s and then spread to all irrigated schemes. The roots of the crisis and its engine lie in the dualism between planning and clientelism at first, then between planning and liberalization, possibly in favor of an extension of crony capitalism to the agricultural sector.

The Syrian crisis has had a significant impact on agriculture and rural areas in Lebanon, pressure on resources, closure of export routes, but also increase in agriculture production and investment in response to a major food security challenge: feeding – and not only through increase importation – a population that has increase by around 30 % after the influx of more than 1.5 million registered and non-registered Syrian refugees. In fact, the impact – which is primarily define by the way local production and actors have reacted to the crisis – often imbed contractions, depending on the actors' point of view (Lebanese versus Syrian, small farmers versus large farmers) but also depending on the time dynamics, as the same phenomenon might have positive impact at the beginning of the crisis and negative impact at a later stage. The present paper presents these contradictions while discussing both historical and current agricultural policies and actions. It concludes that although if the Lebanese agriculture showed positive resilience mechanisms to the crisis, the major issue remains in the post-crisis potential dynamics and the risk of collapse faced by the Lebanese agriculture in the prospect of Syrian Refugees' return.

Through the case study of the rural village of Wādī Fūkīn, situated in the south-west area of Bethlehem (West Bank), this article brings to light the processes that led to the decrease of agricultural production and to food insecurity in the Palestinian territories. It shows the local ecological, economic, and socio-political implications of both Israel's strategies of territory planning and administrative and economic policies and of the so-called “farming modernisation” fostered by development agencies. Then, it highlights villagers' daily agricultural strategies to continue to farm and to struggle for their food security and for the material and socio-cultural reproduction of their family and the whole community.

In a context of transformation and diversification of the eating habits along with structural changes in the alimentation retail system, feeding Istanbul remains a huge challenge for implied economic actorsand public authorities in charge of this nowadays 15 millions people metropolis. Thus, new forms of food insecurity stem principally from the heavy restriction of agricultural lands in the vicinity of Istanbul, the privatization policies of the main supplying chains undergone during the last years and from the emergence of a quality concern among a growing number of consumers that contribute to set up new consummation norms and practices.

Based on a common consumer fruit in Western Europe – strawberry – this article examines the impact of an agro-export production area in Morocco, on the periphery of the European Union, on the host territories and men (employment, food consumption etc.). The games of the actors organized in the Mediterranean area and beyond are questioned in the organization of the production and the quality control. Who makes the strawberry grow and who eats it? Who buys it and who sells it? Who is in charge to regulate exchanges and particularly to manage health risk, that ensures consumers' food safety?

Food production and distribution in the Arab provinces of the Persian Gulf have not changed much for thousands of years. The agricultural and food patterns drawn up in Antiquity really evolved only in the 1960s with the growth of the oil and gas industries, and then in the 2007-2008 period in response to the global food, financial and economic crises. United by their dependence on food imports, the GCC member States started however fighting politically together since the embargo set up around Qatar in June 2017. The undermining of Qatari food security at the very beginning of this crisis has revealed the weaknesses of Arab solidarities. It has also stimulated new alliances that translate into lasting divisions between petro-monarchies and increase the influence of foreign suppliers of agricultural commodities in a context also marked by the volatility of their prices.