ABSTRACT
An important cause of the poverty of the rural masses is the inequitable distribution of land in most of the Middle Eastern countries, where a small number o f wealthy landowners own a large proportion of the land, and there are thousands or millions of dwarf-holders, tenants, and landless labourers. Ίη Egypt in 1933 39 per cent, of the land was held in large estates by 0.6 per cent, of the total number of owners, while no less than two-thirds of the owners held an average of only two-fifths o f an acre each. Such minute holdings could hardly be economically sound, even if devoted to intensive vegetable and fruit production and aided by co-operative societies for marketing the produce, which is not the case. . . . With few exceptions, those who have absolute or hereditary titles to any considerable area of land are, to all intents, absentee landlords. . . . The landlord is a receiver o f rent in cash or kind; he may even sell the right of collecting the rent to the highest bidder, with obvious consequences to his unfortunate tenants; consciously or unconsciously, he is in effect an exploiter of the land and
his tenants. It is hardly necessary to point out that the blame for this disastrous state o f affairs rests not with the individual landlord but with an age-old social system in which a sense of responsibility for the well-being of the land and its workers did not develop.. . . There can be no question whatever of the urgent necessity of attempting to graft on to the system this sense o f responsibility, for history shows that i f the problem of the absentee landlord is allowed to drift, it is liable to be solved by an agrarian revolution. . . . Throughout the Middle East the peasant-proprietor is in the grip o f the money-lender. Although they own their land, they have not the means to improve it and are no better off than the small tenants o f the large landlord who hold only an annual lease/1
Owing to the resultant lack of enterprise of the fellahin and the primitiveness o f their equipment, in some countries a considerable proportion of the land which is capable o f cultivation by the most modern methods is left uncultivated. It is estimated that in Egypt, Palestine, and Transjordan over 70 per cent, o f the cultivable land is already utilized, while in the mountainous Lebanon the rate of utilization is so high that the only outlet for an increasing population has for some decades been emigration. On the other hand, in Syria and Iraq there are vast areas cultivated centuries ago which might once more be brought under crops by modern methods of irrigation. It is estimated that in Iraq irrigated cultivation could be extended to three and a half times its present area.2 While Egypt and Lebanon are already seriously over-populated, and the rapid natural increase in Palestine threatens over-population in another generation, Syria and Iraq have only three and four million inhabitants respectively, or considerably fewer than they supported in antiquity; and an extension of irrigation would undoubtedly permit a corresponding increase in their population.
