IN 1998, the Mubarak regime announced that it would build the largest water-pumping station in the world, taking Nile water from behind the Aswan High Dam reservoir to irrigate portions of the southwestern desert.
The government declared it would convert millions of acres from desert to arable land, transforming the largely arid New Valley province into cultivated fields. The goal of this massive exercise in land reclamation was ostensibly to attract Egypt’s multiplying population from the densely populated “old” Nile River Valley and Delta to the desert periphery. The New Valley Project, or Toshka Project as it was usually called in the Arabic press, was thus justified in terms of a perceived demographic imperative.
The “Mubarak Pumping Station” began operation in 2005, with twenty-four turbines capable of pumping 1.2 million cubic meters of water per hour.1 By winter 2008, however, demand for irrigation water was so limited that only one of the installed turbines was in use at a time. Out of an initial 540,000 acres targeted for reclamation, agribusiness managers in the area reported that only a few thousand were under cultivation.2 Far from being a celebrated achievement of the Mubarak government, the New Valley Project
increasingly embodied its failures. The New Valley Project came to be seen as the paradigmatic example of corruption, inefficacy, and squandered national resources under Mubarak’s rule. As such, the project served as another nail in the coffin of the regime’s exhausted, hollow claims to act in the interests of ordinary Egyptians. By January 2011, the depth of this mass discontent became clear when popular protest broke out across Egyptian cities, and Mubarak’s thirty-year reign ended in a mere eighteen days.
While senior figures of the Mubarak era have been deposed, debates over how to allocate land and water in the context of Egypt’s growing population remain. As this chapter explores, state and private initiatives to “green the desert” have long been central to popular and elite concep-tions of Egypt’s developmental opconcep-tions. Nor has Egypt been alone in this emphasis on land reclamation. Converting desert land to cultivation has figured centrally in nation-building projects in countries as disparate as the United States, Australia, India, Pakistan, China, Central Asia, and the former Soviet Union.3 Colonial and nationalist regimes alike have at-tempted to “green the desert” for a variety of political, economic, and social reasons. In the Middle East, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Libya, and Saudi Arabia established generous incentives for land reclamation to promote economic development and national integration.4
In Egypt, land reclamation was a long-standing practice in the colonial period, producing significant revenue for land-holding elites from crops such as cotton, sugarcane, and rice. By the postcolonial era, state discourse increasingly portrayed land reclamation not simply as an economic invest-ment, but as a social endeavor and a political imperative. New agricultural land would provide employment and physical space for Egypt’s rapidly expanding population. Although Egyptian nationalists and social reform-ers articulated key elements of this demographic imaginary during the colonial period, it was not until the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s that the government began to conceive of large-scale, state-run land reclamation projects. The High Dam offered the Egyptian govern-ment the ability to store the full flow of the Nile River, without relying on a system of barrages in upstream states. More water storage capacity meant the possibility of converting more desert land to irrigated acreage. Reli-ance on large-scale infrastructure and state-driven development planning in Egypt thus echoed the faith in “high modernist” development schemes prevalent across developing and industrial countries alike.5
Even in its heyday during the 1960s, however, the gap between the government’s lofty rhetoric and the realities of land reclamation were sig-nificant. Whereas state narratives about land reclamation were hegemonic
in official propaganda, the situation on the ground—as documented in reports by various government agencies, international donors, and field studies—identified recurrent challenges. Problems with salinity, rising water tables, inadequate drainage, and poor water quality compounded inadequate provision of education and other services.6 State-sponsored land reclamation efforts thus never attracted large numbers of people away from existing urban areas.
When the Mubarak government announced the Toshka Project in 1998, many Egyptian water experts, public intellectuals, and journalists were skeptical of resurrecting land reclamation as a solution to Egypt’s grave developmental dilemmas. Most of these concerns, however, were voiced either in private, for fear of political reprisal, or in the pages of sanctioned opposition papers. These critical voices argued that the deci-sion to undertake the Toshka Project epitomized the regime’s opaque, unaccountable, and sclerotic system of rule. These critical accounts were eventually amplified by the independent media7 and aired in a variety of public forums, including parliamentary debates, international book fairs, and university symposia. In recent years, agribusiness managers tasked with actually reclaiming land in the New Valley have produced their own critical claims about the state’s role in land reclamation. The proliferation and amplification of critical narratives regarding the New Valley Project were thus part of a broader, cumulative critique of the Mubarak regime’s development policies that emerged during the 1990s and 2000s.
This chapter examines the evolution of Egyptian narratives about environment, population, and development through the prism of land reclamation. I show how different actors—state officials, environmental experts, and agribusiness managers—created distinctive yet interrelated story-lines around the notion of converting desert land to irrigated crop-land. For Maarten Hajer, story-lines are discursive constructions that combine different (often highly specialized and complex) discourses into legible, simplified framings of an environmental problem that appeal to differently situated actors.8
The dominant story-line in Egyptian environmental history and policy, as outlined in the next section of this chapter, has been an eco-logical-demographic narrative of crisis, in which limited arable land and the pressure of an increasing population require ongoing horizon-tal expansion of arable lands. This narrative still infuses governmenhorizon-tal planning and investment, but I suggest it is increasingly dissociated from two key developments. First, Egyptian water experts circulate a parallel
crisis narrative, highlighting Egypt’s scarce and polluted water resources.
These water crisis narratives have in the past few years sparked questions about using such a scarce resource to cultivate desert land. Second, while official discourse highlights the role of the state in promoting land recla-mation, reclaiming desert land has instead proceeded largely through the cumulative investments of agribusiness firms and peasant farmers, not the state.
In order to explain the staying power of the official demographic-ecological crisis narrative despite these dissonances, the third section of this chapter explores the historical construction of this foundational environmental imaginary as it was elaborated during the interwar and early postcolonial period. For Egyptian reformers, land reclamation would remake the lives of the peasantry by physically relocating them to a new cultural, social, and natural “environment.” This populist and paternalistic framing of land reclamation persisted in official discourse through the Sadat period. In the fourth section, I show how key elements of this narrative were recast in the Mubarak era, as modern environ-mental idioms were introduced into the old neo-Malthusian narrative about a demographic crisis. These official justifications for the New Val-ley Project, however, encountered critiques launched by environmental scientists, journalists in opposition papers, and leading officials, which are traced in the fifth section.
Whereas in the Nasser period, newly irrigated lands were to benefit poorer peasants directly through ownership, in Mubarak’s New Valley Project, agribusiness was to be the principal beneficiary of newly irrigated land. These firms were supposed to conserve water through the use of new technologies and produce high-quality, organic products for export. In the sixth part of the chapter, I turn to the largely private narratives produced by agribusiness managers, who link the problems of desert land reclama-tion with the government’s opaque policy-making and unclear commit-ment to property rights.
Despite the proliferation of critical narratives since the inception of the New Valley Project in 1998, however, the long-standing ecological-demographic imaginaire remains a key element of political discourse in Egypt. At the end of this essay, I note how the story-lines produced by offi-cials, scientists, public intellectuals, and journalists continue to share some key assumptions about the desirability of reclaiming desert land. I then sketch the key elements that might inform a more fundamental rethinking of Egypt’s dominant environmental imaginary.