‘Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa’ studies the political economy of agrarian transformation in the Middle East and North Africa. Examining Egypt and Tunisia in detail as case studies, it critiques the dominant tropes of food security offered by the international financial institutions and promotes the importance of small-scale family farming in developing sustainable food sovereignty. Egypt and Tunisia are located in the context of the broader Middle East and broader processes of war, environmental transformation and economic reform.
The book contributes to uncovering the historical backdrop and contemporary pressures in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for the uprisings of 2010 and 2011. It also explores the continued failure of post-uprising counter-revolutionary governments to directly address issues of rural development that put the position and role of small farmers centre stage.
‘Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa’ uniquely presents a political economy of agrarian transformation in the MENA region by problematising the persistent politicisation of food and rural (under)development exemplified in the case studies of Egypt and Tunisia. These cases highlight the ways in which de-development has led to the persistent impoverishment of the countryside and its uneven consequences for the ways it reproduced power, politics and inequality. The political economy of food in the region is played out in the broader complex of global food regimes and their contestation by counter-hegemonic initiatives for food sovereignty.
