Re-imagining farm land in arid countries. Land reclamation projects and socio-environmental trajectories in Egypt's desert lands
In Egypt, over the last sixty years, marginal lands have been at the core of new narratives envisioning the future of the Egyptian agriculture in the desert. A fast demographic growth, growing claims on Nile waters and the process of climate change are reinforcing today this call to desert lands for the sake of Egypt's people. Drawing on environmental history (Davis, 2011 ; Mikhaïl, 2013) and on the literature exploring land imaginaries (Sippel & Visser ; Jasanoff, 2015 ; Watkins, 2015), this communication sheds light on the trajectories – both in time and space – of arid marginal lands. Since the middle of the 20th century, Egyptian desert lands have been the places of major political and economic projects, aiming at overcoming land constraints and building a new productive and profitable agriculture.
The web of links between land visions and the process of desert land reclamation in Egypt will be explained. I will more specifically discuss how desert land trajectories are the results of new « socio-technical imaginaries » (Jasanoff, 2015), carried out by powerful public institutions, private stakeholders and experts. All of them have been promoting and actively contributing to the expansion of agricultural land and the design of new land-scapes. Operated by modern land-tillers, those frontier territories are shaped and controlled by the expansion of new irrigation systems, productive innovations and a set of technical devices. All of them characterize a broader process affecting many arid and semi-arid countries, where agricultural fronts are transforming barren lands into homogeneous farm landscapes. Dominated by pivots and greenhouses, they also see an emerging trend towards hydroponics farming with no soil at all.
Mots clés : arid land|land trajectories|land reclamation|agricultural frontier|imaginaries
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