• 05:51
  • Friday ,04 October 2013
العربية

The Crisis of the Agricultural Land

Magdy Malak

Article Of The Day

13:10

Saturday ,05 October 2013

The Crisis of the Agricultural Land
While I was going to give my condolences to one of my relatives who died at the hands of thieves stealing his jewelry, on my way I passed by land used for agriculture, and was surprised that all the land turned into places for buildings instead of farms and plants.  This land was used before to cultivate different plants like wheat, whey, corn, and many other plants. Now, I saw only buildings where fertile land stood.
 
This area spreads 25 km, it wasn’t just one or two buildings, it was a whole community changed. I believe this change happened after the January 25th revolution. Before the revolution, I believe there were some buildings, but not at all of this stature. On my way I was asking myself the following question: how will we be able to feed our children in the future? How could the government allow this chaos to happen?
 
The loss of agricultural land means that we will not find any groups responsible for feeding our population of 90 million, this will make us resort to foreign countries to import wheat any other necessities. This means we will always be in need for dollars to make these purchases. At the same time, we do not have any resources for dollars right now because tourism is essentially non-existent. Many foreign factories also closed after the revolution, and that means we will suffer from huge inflation, and people will suffer from a lack of receiving their main needs. 
 
We have already been suffering from this problem because potatoes alone cost 6 pounds; beans cost 8 pounds, because the decrease in agricultural land means we will be dependent on others to get our food. You will never have self-sustained satisfaction. This is a big problem Egypt is facing right now. Egypt and all political forces are now fighting in politics, but no one is fighting for the economy. Egypt will be in a big disaster. I am warning the decision makers that if they didn’t take notice of this disaster, Egypt will starve. I’m not exaggerating the issue or the problem, but I saw with my own eyes 25 km of agricultural land turned to be cement and buildings.
 
With the expectation of increasing the Egyptian population within the next few years, what do we expect will happen to our future generation? Our main concern should be increasing the agricultural land, not decreasing it. All political parts, which I saw on tv, are searching for a role in politics, but I never saw one searching for a role in the economy!