ABSTRACT

In the wake of the 25 January 2011 uprising in Egypt, activists and law makers went after ousted President Hosni Mubarak’s ‘cronies’, including finance capitalists connected to Mubarak’s son, for stealing the national wealth. Although political patronage and corruption have clearly been at play in the growing inequality in Egypt and the wider region, the dominant classes have been able to reproduce themselves largely through an elaborate legal set of relations and institutions in the neoliberal period. This chapter demonstrates how through this infrastructure for doing business legitimately the formal economy – and the agriculture and food sector, in particular – has consolidated in the hands of a few family business groups, financial firms, regional MNCs, TNCs, and the military. Riding on two waves of regional and global economic crises since the early 1990s, finance rose in importance for the growth and capital concentration of a corporate agri-food system in Egypt. This system has directly and indirectly undermined food security for the masses by exacerbating the country’s balance-of-payments difficulties (through imports) and, thereby, increasing class-based vulnerabilities to global food-price fluctuations leading up to the 2011 political uprising. This study contributes a world-historical perspective of financialization by relating methodologically and empirically US-centred processes of financialization to destabilizing forces of economic and political change in Egypt.