Wednesday food shopping. Now at the point where we are only buying food when we can identify the specific meal it’s slated for. And sadly passing up fruit and veg of a quality we’re unlikely to see until next winter. Had we only bought pears in northern Ontario I would have had no idea how sweet and juicy they could be.
Continuing with Jack Shenker's The Egyptians: A Radical Story. What is most radical about it is Shenker’s own, entirely justified, rage about what a neoliberal anti-socialist agenda fuelled by greed on the part of an Egyptian elite as well as the greed of multinational investers and corporations has done to ordinary Egyptians, especially those who made a very modest living farming small amounts of land. The villains of the piece include not only Mubarek and cronies but also the World Bank, USAID, and others committed for less than altruistic reasons to economic restructuring:
Continuing with Jack Shenker's The Egyptians: A Radical Story. What is most radical about it is Shenker’s own, entirely justified, rage about what a neoliberal anti-socialist agenda fuelled by greed on the part of an Egyptian elite as well as the greed of multinational investers and corporations has done to ordinary Egyptians, especially those who made a very modest living farming small amounts of land. The villains of the piece include not only Mubarek and cronies but also the World Bank, USAID, and others committed for less than altruistic reasons to economic restructuring:
“Evictions] left 1 million families – one-third of Egypt’s rural population – without land. The removal” of most families’ primary source of income sparked a rash of ‘abrupt impoverishment’, devastating the most vulnerable social groups. Research carried out in rural areas in the years following the ‘transition’ has exposed the many hidden catastrophes of landlessness: children taken out of school, especially girls, to cut down on household expenditure, severe food shortages (the Land Center for Human Rights listed ‘sleeping early to avoid feeling hungry’ as a common coping strategy deployed by peasants), a dramatic expansion of child labour, and the selling off of household assets”.
Interesting, but not an easy read. The book was published in 2016. We were last in Egypt in 2016, so the period in which Shenker was writing the book more or less coincides with our being there.
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