ABSTRACT
The large-scale government intervention into agricultural production was a new departure for twentieth-century Egyptian governments, and established precedents for the policies of the Nasser regime. The regime's "Arab Socialism" or "state capitalism" fell between two stools, generating problems which the Sadat regime has inherited. This chapter reviews the three principal agricultural policy instruments of the regime: land reform and cooperativization, investment decisions, and price and output regulations. The Egyptian government used cooperatives to market crops and to supply inputs to farmers. The regime's problem was the classic one of how to extract resources for industrialization and military and social spending from agriculture without at the same time undermining production incentives for farmers. The government's goals were to acquire foreign exchange, which would have to come largely from agricultural exports and to provide cheap food for the cities both to prevent food-price inflation and to avoid the political instability which urban food shortages would engender.
