Explicaciones en el aula

Table 8 describes the factors that limited women’s access to land through the MRS. In this section, I turn to the factors that limited women’s access to land.

When asked, many officials in Cairo and in the local settlements reported that women were few in number because they did not apply for land due to their limited mobility and fear of the ‘desert’. “Women did not access land because they did not apply in the first place. A man can go anywhere and stay anywhere, but a woman’s parents would not let her apply to go away to farm the desert. A woman cannot stay in the desert like a man can,” explained the former Head of the Intilaq Settlement. “A man is hardier and can tolerate the land,”

explained a local Village Engineer in Sa’yda. In fact, most of the women who accessed land relocated with their fathers, husbands, or brothers to farm the desert.

Table 8 Factors that limited women from accessing land.

Categories of Land Access

Factors limiting land access in Intilaq

Factors limiting land access in Sa’yda

Land occupiers (full title)

N/A Requires weapons, which women

often do not own

Graduates (full title)

Did not know about land distribution opportunities Not interested in relocating into the desert

Did not know about land distribution opportunities

Not interested in relocating into the desert

Government imposed high standards for women’s access to land as graduates

Women are not as educated as men

Since 2004, only entrepreneurs were provided with land access

Government imposed high standards for women’s access to land as graduates

Women are not as educated as men

Since 2004, only entrepreneurs were provided with land access

WHH sub Category (full title)

N/A Since 2004, only entrepreneurs were

provided with land access

Wives of Evicted Tenants (Joint title)

The subsequent Minister of MALR disapproved of joint titles

Local officials felt that women had no right to joint titles Husbands felt that their wives had no claim to their lands

The subsequent Minister of MALR disapproved of joint titles

Local officials felt that women had no right to joint titles

Husbands felt that their wives had no claim to their lands

The lack of security in the New Lands was perceived by local settlers and officials as particularly dangerous for women. “Some men, when their daughters are older, relocate into the Old Lands for fear of the impacts the lack of security will have on their daughters,” explained the Vice Head of the LRS. Most women landholders reported being very scared since they relocated into the New Lands, “there is no police here. We sleep and wake up in fear,” explained Om Badawi. “One of the biggest problems here is the lack of security. People here are from all over the place and there is no police. You see, now as I am sitting in the house, I feel scared,” explained Basma, wife of a Graduate Landholder in Intlaq.

Fear of being isolated and the lack of security, among other problems, and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that social networks in the Old Lands were lost once these women moved to the New Lands all generated reluctance for women to relocate into desert lands, especially for those unmarried women who have already experienced the New Lands

firsthand. In the Sa’yda settlement, I indeed saw many women who refused to apply for land after the Revolution when land access was opened to the masses. “No I did not apply for land. What will I do with the land? I cannot farm it. Of course, I will not go live there by

myself in the desert,” said Amoona, a daughter of a WL in Sa’yda. “No I did not apply; I do not want to live in the desert. I cannot wait to get married and leave this place,” said Fatma, another daughter of WL in Sa’yda. Furthermore, due to the reality that many women who applied for land did so through their brothers, fathers, and husbands points to the possibility that many women might have shied away from the tedious bureaucratic process required for applying to land.

Spending time in the two settlements also revealed other reasons why women did not access land. The fact that these women were unable to access land illustrates (1) the

prevailing corruption and resulting inequalities and (2) the focus on entrepreneurs for large- scale land acquisitions since 2004.

Many women in the Intilaq settlement wanted to access land for their own future security but reported that there were no current opportunities: “I would really want to get land, if they are giving more land. Land is security. In case a woman got upset with her husband, she would have something to rely on,” explained Rasmiya, a daughter of a GWL in Intilaq. I met four women (two in Intilaq and two in Sa’yda) who really wanted to access land and who took action to realize that ambition. Three of these women were widows, and one was married but was having trouble with her husband. A woman of Intilaq, Om Adel, wanted the land as a means to raise her young children and reduce her dependence on her brothers. She had the skills to farm desert land. She also experienced firsthand the benefits of being a landholder in the New Lands, as many government and development agencies’ income generation projects were accessible to landholders. Land, however, was not given to smallholders from 2004 until 2011.

Om Adel has a high school diploma in commerce from a technical school. She is widowed and is 37 years old. Om Adel asked her brother to let her farm his land that he acquired as a graduate through the MRS. He did not want to farm the land, and his wife did not want to relocate into desert lands. Relocating and cultivating the land is a condition set by the state to retain the land. Especially during the early stages of resettlement, many landholders who left their lands fallow and houses unoccupied were evicted. Her brother gave her the land to have it cultivated. As a settler and farmer in the New Lands, Om Adel attended many agricultural training sessions at the DDC in Al Khartoum village. Om Adel has two young boys, 9 and 11 years old. She plants peanuts and wheat on her brother’s land. During the summer time, she takes her children to live in the New Lands. “The house is very crowded at my parents’ house. I really like it here in the New Lands. It is quiet and much more spacious,” Om

Adel explained. Because the quality of schools in the Intilaq settlement is inferior, Om Adel chose to stay with her children at her parents’ house during school time, she explained. Her father always accompanied her, she stressed, when she relocates into the New Lands with her two boys in the summer time. Om Adel is financially

dependent on her brothers, she lamented. Nonetheless, she started working in the past two years as an accountant in a rental place for agricultural machinery in a village also in the New Lands. Her income is very low (equivalent to $26 per month), she complained, that it barely covers transportation costs. As a result, Om Adel goes to work only for three days per month. She stays in her brother’s house in the News Lands to commute to her work. Om Adel’s sister is also a widow. “Our burden is heavy on my brothers. They take care of us. I want to increase my income. I wish I could get a piece of land, or start a knitting circle to make decent money,” Om Adel explained. She said that one time she was very close to opening a clothing

workstation, but a GWL objected. According to Om Adel, the other woman complained to the project officials who considered Om Adel. She complained that Om Adel was not a landholder but a sister of a landholder. She did not end up getting the position, as a result, but rather the woman who complained did. She said that there were no opportunities for land applications.

Om Shaheera, similarly, wanted to access land to help her become independent. She wanted to become free of her abusive husband.

Om Shaheera had two girls and one boy. Her husband is a Graduate landholder. He was doing well in the beginning until he decided to look for treasures on his land. This is not uncommon in Egypt. A fortuneteller told him that there is treasure in his land. He had cultivated his land with mangoe trees. He took out the mango trees and excavated his land. He didn’t find any treasures but his economic situation went downwards. He stopped supporting his family and abusing his wife by belittling her and threatening to abandon her. Her friend and Om Omar, a GWL, found her a job in the local clinic which IFAD funds. Om Shaheera cleans the clinic. Om Omar also helped Om Shaheera by setting her up to meet with Engineer Kamal, who is responsible for providing Graduate settlers with Land Expansion Projects. Om Shaheera approached him and told him she needs land to raise her children. He promised her he would do the best he could to provide her with land. But when the Revolution happened later, when she asked him again for land, he reported that the Revolution put a block on all decision-making processes at the LRS and the

government more generally.

One of the two widows in Sa’yda wanted to access housing, but not land, for herself and her family’s upkeep. She knocked on the doors of many officials in the Aswan

governorate but did not hear a response yet. The second widowed woman in Sa’yda wanted land, not for farming but as a security for the future of her children.

“Tomorrow or after my children will find land to support them in their future,” Om Mostafa said. Om Mostafa has four children. She has a high school diploma in

commerce from a technical school. Her husband died years ago of liver cancer due to Hepatitis C. Her husband worked for years in the local LDU. He was provided with housing in Sa’yda and was living there with his family. Upon his death, Om Mostafa was hired as an accountant in the same LDU. She complained that her income is not enough to raise her children, send them to college, and feed them. Her income is equivalent to $80 per month. She raises goats and sheep and sells them for a good price. When Om Mostafa’s husband passed away her brother-in-law proposed to her, but his wife became furious and the marriage did not happen. Om Mostafa reported that her brother-in-law’s wife gave her a very hard time whenever the brother-in-law accompanied Om Mostafa or her children to accomplish important tasks, such as registering her elder son for military college. Om Mostafa was persistent in her attempts to acquire land. She called the Head of the LRS in Cairo on a monthly basis. “He keeps telling me next month. He also told me that providing land is a decision he cannot make. The Minister of MALR himself, he told me, needs to approve such a move,” she explained. Additionally, every time the Head of the LRS visits the Sa’yda settlement, Om Mostafa was informed by the employees at the LDU. She prepared herself for meeting with him to request land but without success. “Each time the Head visits they tell us [the government workers at the LDU] to be present in our job posts, when he comes, and be prepared to meet him. But, each time he never visits us, he just visits the villages from the outside without stopping to talk to us at the LDU or at the LAC,” complained Om Mostafa.

As mentioned earlier, the government switched its focus away from small holders to entrepreneurs for desert land provision. As a result, many who wanted to acquire land were not given the chance, but the opportunity was left exclusively to rich entrepreneurs.

Another reason for the lack of land access for many women was corruption. In the same time period when Om Mostafa was trying to access land, Dr. Zabadi accessed large pieces of desert land very easily as I learned from the Head of the LDU. Dr. Zabadi had strong connections to a former Prime Minister. By calling the Minister of the MALR, he acquired over 200 acres of land in various settlements and villages in the same settlement. He allegedly took the land to conduct research about medicinal and aromatic plants. He did not conduct research on the land (15 acres) he acquired in Sa’yda. He cultivated wheat and henna by sharecropping with local people in the area. Many local LDU drivers complained that his sharecropping often turned out to be fraudulent. Even after the Revolution, when I met him at the LRS, he was bragging that he recently accessed 30 acres from the Minister of MALR in the desert to cultivate aromatic and medicinal plants. The ease and scale at which this individual acquired land, while other women almost begged for land and housing without success, is mind boggling. Along the same lines, in many cases friends of officials and their wives acquired land in both settlements much easier than the rest of the population.

As mentioned above, the LRS set conditions on female applicants’ social status that were not set for men. Women had to be WHHs in Sa’yda and unmarried in Intilaq. Men, on the other hand, were not required to be of a certain social status. In Sa’yda it was reported that WLs were worried about remarrying due to a fear of losing their access to MRS land and housing.

Now that the Revolution introduced new land reclamation projects, it is unclear whether women would gain land access again without the involvement of the WFP due to a general reluctance by development agencies to fund land reclamation projects (Mitchell 2002; Warner 2013) and a general feeling at the LRS that it is not necessary to give women land. “Women are not a formal category in the Law of Land Reclamation. There are no obligations to give them land,” explained the Head of Settlers’ Affairs at the LRS.

4.6 Conclusion

The WFP’s gender-progressive policies are largely responsible for providing

Egyptian women with land titles. The WFP policy of empowering women with ownership of property was forcefully implemented by imposing access to land for women as a

precondition for food aid. The international pressure and WFP policies for achieving equality for women by imposing on the government a requirement to treat “women as equal citizens with men with the same rights and obligations”, as reported by a former Head of the LRS, was not realized and women’s access to land was restricted. The reality that women were required to score higher than men and be of exclusively agricultural backgrounds is a case in point. Furthermore, perhaps some feminists who believe in women quotas would argue that removing the gender category in the MRS selection criteria does not lead to women’s equality, but would instead reproduce their subordination. Another case in point is that, to receive land, a woman had to be single. Why would a single woman all by herself relocate into the desert where she would have limited basic services and transportation, thereby cutting herself off from her family and social support in the Old Lands.

Although the LRS cancelled the gender category in the point system to allow for ‘equitable access to land’ by both genders, most of the other categories, including type of education and farming background, inherently favored men. Marrital status was an additional condition for women to access property but not the case for men. It seems that in future land reclamation

projects women are less likely to access land unless the WFP or other gender-progressive development agencies are involved and a women category is legislated in the Law of Land Reclamation. In Chapters 5 and 6 we will understand better why women are less likely to access land in the future if these two conditions are not met.

While some policies, particulary those of the WFP, helped women access land, other policies restricted women’s access to land, particularly those related to the Egyptian state. The MRS headquarters in Nobariya in the early 1990s became reluctant to give more women desert land when many women did not relocate, and made women’s access to land, in

general, difficult as a punishment. Despite the fact that even male settlers did not relocate into the desert (personal observation, Meyers 1998), women were blamed for the general reluctance to relocate. Official goals of treating women as equal citizens with equal rights contradicted practice. Walker (2003) similarly reports how, in South Africa, a land reform program that officially aimed at providing women with land access failed because, in practice, disinterested and busy bureaucrats and middle managers did not ensure that these women were given land. Perhaps more importantly, a gender bias towards providing male heads of households with land access limited married women’s access to land, as has been found in other public land distribution projects, for example in India (Agarwal 2003: 200).

The Graduates and WHHs offer valuable insights into the subject of women and land rights. The Graduates’ case provides an example of women being provided with land access on grounds other than those of heads of households, which is often the exclusive category in which women access land in land distribution schemes (Deere and Leon 2001, Varley 2007). The WHHs category also provides valuable insights into cases of land access for women who are relatively independent from patriarchy, which Jackson (2003: 476) predicts is likely to lead to the biggest social changes.

The government imposed the precondition that land access was dependent on actually farming the land. Yet, many of these women wanted land for the future of their children or for their own ‘security’ and not necessarily for farming. In fact, having to immediately farm