Land Reform

In 1952, Egypt was an overwhelmingly agricultural country. Its principal source of wealth was the cultivation and export of premium-quality cotton. The great majority of the rural population were malnourished, illiterate, and afflicted with disease — especially schistosomiasis, which they contracted from parasites inhabiting the still waters of irrigation ditches where they worked barefoot for hours at a time.

In the last years of the monarchy, wealth and political power were concentrated in the hands of twelve thousand large landowning families who comprised less than 0.5 percent of the rural population and owned about 35 percent of the arable land. At the bottom of the agrarian class structure, 60 percent of all rural households neither owned nor rented land and worked as wage laborers, while 2 million families, 72 percent of all landowners, owned plots of less than one feddan (1.04 acres), barely enough for subsistence.

The Free Officers’ program promised to eliminate “feudalism,” an imprecise term for the economic and political power of the large landowners. To accomplish this, they decreed a modest land reform — less radical than comparable post–World War II measures adopted under US supervision in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

The Land Reform Law of September 9, 1952 limited individual ownership to two hundred feddans and three hundred feddans for a family — very large holdings by Egyptian standards. Initially, some seventeen hundred landowners, including 425 members of the royal family, lost 10 percent of Egypt’s arable land.

By 1970, 15 percent of the arable land had been redistributed. The landless population had declined to 43 percent of rural households, and the share of the agricultural income received by wage workers and owners of less than five feddans had doubled.

Medium and rich peasants with access to credit to buy additional land were the main beneficiaries of the land redistribution. The key provisions of the law that raised the rural standard of living were a limit on agrarian rents, to no more than seven times the value of the annual tax on the land, and an agricultural minimum wage.