Al-Ahram Weekly | Chronicles

That many international conferences were held in Egypt was not surprising. What was odd was that despite being a country that depended vastly on farming, Egypt did not have a single conference on agriculture to its name until 1936. Professor Yunan Labib Rizk opens the First Egyptian Agricultural Conference

As the 20th century progressed, Cairo increasingly became the venue for a range of international conferences, all of which were assiduously covered in Al-Ahram. Not surprisingly, most of these conferences were held in winter, when Europeans flocked to Egypt to tour its antiquities and bask in the warmth of the Nile sun. It was an ideal opportunity to blend academic exchange with tourism and commerce. What was curious, however, was that none of the conferences that were held until the mid-1930s dealt with that activity in which the overwhelming majority of Egyptians were engaged: agriculture. The conspicuous absence of this subject is all the more explicit given the visible attention the authorities and the press accorded it. Of particular note was the Agricultural Industries Exhibition periodically hosted by the government, and the almost daily appearance of agricultural news in the newspapers. Indeed, on 15 May 1935, Al-Ahram produced a 64-page "agricultural edition" that quickly vanished from the stands even though it went for twice the price of an ordinary edition.

The economic centrality of agriculture was also tangibly embodied in the many organisations that were established to promote it: the Agricultural Society (1898), the Farmers' Federation (1902), the Department of Agriculture (1911) that later became the Ministry of Agriculture, and the General Agricultural Syndicate (1921). The concern for this sector of the economy also gave rise to many specialised schools and colleges. The Agricultural School in Giza founded in 1890 was elevated to a college in 1911 and later became one of the first faculties of the Egyptian University. At a lower educational level, the Mushtahir Agricultural Training School founded in 1911 spawned three offshoots by 1936, one of which was established in Upper Egypt.

The long delay of an international conference specially devoted to agriculture will probably remain a mystery. Moreover, when, in April 1936, the occasion did finally arise, the stimulus and response were purely Egyptian; not a single foreigner participated in spite of the many Europeans involved in agriculture in Egypt. The "First Egyptian Agricultural Conference" was aptly named.

The initiative for the conference came from the Association of Graduates of the Giza Agricultural College. Founded in 1918, the society pledged "to undertake to the best of its abilities all actions necessary to promote agricultural reform, from founding an Agrarian club to strengthen the bonds and encourage the exchange of information between graduates and students of agriculture and prominent farmers, to hosting lectures on agricultural and related industries, and to producing the Farmers' Periodical to serve as a forum for opinion and research on agricultural issues of concern to farmers and scholars alike".

Al-Ahram relates that the idea of a conference for studying various matters of direct or indirect import to agricultural production had first occurred to the members of the association several years earlier. After examining the feasibility of such a project, the society's administrative committee formed a subcommittee to organise the conference. This, in turn, instigated the search for a high-profile conference chairman whose prestige and influence would help bring the project to light. Prince Omar Touson seemed the perfect candidate because of his dedication to agricultural affairs, and an invitation was extended and accepted.

It was first proposed to hold the conference in March 1935 so as to coincide with the association's general assembly meeting. Then the agricultural fair seemed to offer a more propitious opportunity, but organisers thought better of the idea when it transpired that participants would be too busy with the business of the fair itself. Finally, they resolved on 24 April 1936.

From its reports on the preparations for the conference, it was clear that Al-Ahram was very impressed by the organisers' scrupulous attention to the minutest detail. They divided themselves into organisational committees to devise programmes, arrange excursions and produce publicity, and into academic committees whose task it was to sort through the papers submitted, allocate them to subcommittees and collate them into booklets for each committee. It was further decided that rather than read out the studies in full, their authors would deliver oral abstracts of their work. "Then, following the lecture, the minute-taker for each committee will produce a written summary of the comments that were aired during the discussions of the papers."

The organisers scheduled the inaugural session for 4.30pm on Friday 24 April. Papers would be read on Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday and the closing session would be held on Thursday. In its programme, published in Al-Ahram, the Agricultural Graduates Association urged "all concerned" to participate in the conference. "The admission fee is 50 piastres, which includes all the excursions, the conference publications and emblems, and a dinner banquet."

The many lecture committees are indicative of the wealth of information that would be exchanged in the conference. To name a few, there were the Farmers Cooperative and Finance Committee, the Agricultural Produce Committee, the Horticulture Committee, the Social Reform Committee, the Committee on Egyptian Women and their Contribution to Agriculture, the Agricultural Pests and Diseases Committee, the Taxes and Property Registration Committee, and the Livestock and Poultry Committee. In other words, every concern in Egyptian agricultural life was to be covered.

At the appointed time in the Agricultural Society lecture hall, Al-Ahram 's reporter was on hand to applaud the commencement of the long overdue conference. "It was as though Egypt, with its ancient agricultural tradition and which has built its glory since the most remote epochs on the treasures its land produces, wanted to make up for what it missed by proclaiming at the top of its lungs that a conference such as this should long have been a priority concern."

Prince Omar Touson opened the conference with a short, conventional address. The purpose of the conference, he said, was to "study the various aspects of agricultural concerns in our country and to find solutions to the difficulties that impede the advancement of agriculture in a country that is almost wholly dependent upon this sector". Minister of Agriculture Sadeq Hanin's speech was more conventional yet. Delivered by a deputy, it praised the efforts of all those who had made the conference possible and wished the participants all possible success. The address of Fouad Abaza, chairman of the Association of Agricultural School Graduates and the conference chairman, had a little more substance. The conference, he said, was inspired by the desire to study the diverse dimensions of agricultural affairs "in light of the upheaval in global economic systems caused by the sudden economic crisis and the effects of which have been more severely felt by farmers than by any other occupational group in this country". Abaza proceeded to review the focal areas of study in the conference, after which he expressed his regret that there would not be sufficient time for as many field trips as the organisers would have liked to have arranged. "Visits will be limited to the experimental station of the Ministry of Agriculture's Horticultural Department in Al-Qanater Al-Kheiriya, to the ministry's poultry station on Shair Island, to the Royal Agricultural Society's farm in Bahtim and to the Egyptian Linen Company's factory in Qayratin."

At 10.00am the following day, the committees went into session to read and discuss the various papers. An overview of the titles should be sufficient to give an idea of the range of topics. In the farmers' cooperatives and Finance Committee: "The cooperative movement" and "Agricultural loans and the agricultural lending bank". In the Agricultural Produce Committee: "Reasons for the lack of grain yields and possible remedies", "Improving wheat seed" and "Harvesting and ginning to preserve the competitive qualities and augment the prices of different types of cotton". The Horticulture Committee had the heaviest schedule: "The production and marketing of fruits," "Sweets in Egypt," "Banana cultivation," "Pollinating palm trees," "The factors that affect the mango flower," "The pollination of the custard apple," "Pruning plants" and, finally, "Vegetables in Egypt."

It was in the Egyptian Women and Agriculture Committee that the only paper delivered by a woman was, "Egyptian women in the village" by Bint El-Shati. The other paper was "Egyptian women and their contribution to agriculture". In the property tax committee, participants studied: "Alleviating farmers' debts", "The agricultural property tax system" and "The history of the international economic crisis". Papers read in the Produce Disposal Committee included "The modern cotton market", while in the Livestock and Poultry Committee they included "Animal husbandry in Egypt", "A practical policy for improving Egyptian livestock", "Dairy products and the dairy industry in Egypt" and "Poultry farming". Finally, the Agricultural Pests and Diseases Committee: "Focusing control of economic pests on fruit bearing trees", "How to equip for pest control", "The cotton worm", "The almond worm and ways to combat it", "The pomegranate worm" and "How to combat stored grain pests".

Clearly, participants were not idling away their time. Some committee sessions, as we have seen, dealt with six or more papers and, moreover, some participants delivered more than one. Al-Ahram, too, had its work cut out for it. Even after selecting the subjects that it felt would be of most interest to its readers, its presentation of the papers took nearly three months.

Significantly, it opened this chapter with the lecture on "Agricultural education", whose author did not mince words. The government, he charged, "has consigned this field of education to oblivion, in spite of the fact that in a country such as Egypt, in which agriculture is its backbone, this field of education should have the greatest share of care and attention". He adds that the curricula in all areas of this field should be designed to ensure that all the necessary information is well presented and accessible.

The author went on to present several recommendations for improving the agricultural educational system. Firstly, all agricultural schools should be placed under the Ministry of Education so as to facilitate exchanges between teachers and experts in the ministry. Agricultural schools should be designed with their aims in mind. Their sites should be carefully chosen before construction, the buildings constructed in accordance with the latest specifications and the classrooms staffed with the most competent teachers possible. The ministry should further designate the land upon which each student would have a patch upon which to perform agricultural experiments. Again on curricula -- a subject which, understandably, he went on at length -- the writer held that the agricultural schools wasted too much time on "non-agricultural preparatory sciences". In his opinion, these subjects should be condensed into a single unit so that students would not be compelled to pass each of them separately, "even though as essential sciences they should be as familiar with them as possible". In order to be admitted into mid-level agricultural training schools, students had to have obtained a first level secondary school degree. He feared, however, that these students would be encouraged to complete their secondary school education so as to qualify for admission into the university's agricultural faculty. He therefore recommended lowering admissions requirements into the agricultural training schools to the elementary school certificate level. More important to him, however, was the fate of agricultural school graduates. These, in his opinion, required ongoing training and he proposed a programme that he felt that, with the assistance of the government, private contributors and cooperative societies, would help graduates apply the knowledge they had gained in their studies to practical applications. He also encouraged agricultural firms, major agricultural property holders and the government to employ as many of these graduates as possible.

The second lecture Al-Ahram published, under the headline "From the agricultural conference", was on agricultural policy. The lecturer, Boutros Basili, director of the Guidance Department at the Ministry of Agriculture, was no less critical than the author of the preceding lecture. In his opinion, agricultural policy in Egypt "is not founded on a proper foundation". He explains: "The crisis which plagues farmers in Egypt is not the product of poor farming or the spread of agricultural pests, but rather of the rupture in the economic order that prevailed prior to the Great War and the new policies of commercial exchange that nations adopted in the wake of that war." Basili, too, had several remedies to recommend. Greater attention should be given to land reclamation and irrigation works so as to increase cultivable land, he urged. "This will enable us to become self-sufficient in crops which we are currently compelled to import in large quantities." Towards this end, the government should initiate a crop substitution campaign, offering farmers incentives to cultivate those crops that the country currently imported from abroad. Secondly, the system of agricultural loans and methods of production had to be improved so as to simultaneously increase yields and enable farmers to increase their profits from these yields. Thirdly, all possible efforts should be given to studying international markets in terms of their potential for Egyptian produce and to use all available means to secure the access of Egyptian produce to those markets.

Hussein Fahmi in "Reinvigorating agricultural activity in Egypt", the third lecture featured in Al-Ahram, was less critical and less pessimistic than his two colleagues mentioned. "The people of Egypt should not ignore an indisputable fact which is that the comparative advantages with which they have been endowed in the field of agricultural production give them an enormous edge in the arena of international competition. Nowhere else in the world is the earth as fertile as that in Egypt. No other country in the world has land capable of producing two or more yields of one crop in a single year."

In spite of these advantages, Egyptians still imported much of their staples from abroad. In fact, in 1928, such imports exceeded LE5 million. To counter this trend, Fahmi urged, the government should institute a plan for gradually diversifying cultivation, developing production of grain crops and improving pest control. In addition to promoting self-sufficiency in agricultural produce, the country should also double its efforts towards increasing Egyptian agricultural exports. Publicity campaigns, exemption from export taxes and subsidies to exporters of designated products were among the measures that would serve this end. He further recommended the creation of a "national bureau" to act as an intermediary between Egyptian producers and consumers in Egypt and abroad. One of its major tasks would be to study consumer trends and the marketing possibilities of individual products, match this information to the levels of production of these products and recommend ways to modify production and processing to meet their export potential.

From self-sufficiency and trade related issues, Al-Ahram turned to irrigation. The title of the first lecture alone would have raised readers' eyebrows. In "The threat of irrigation projects to agricultural land in Egypt", Youssef Milad said that the land he owned in Menoufiya had been some of the most fertile in the area. But following the construction of an irrigation canal next to it, 25 out of the 75 feddans he owned lost their fertility, 10 feddans went fallow, and 15 produced two qintars of cotton, two ardebs of wheat and five ardebs of corn, "and this only in the best years".

A horticultural expert in the Ministry of Agriculture, Milad explained that the problem with the irrigation system in Egypt was that canals were built so as to raise the water level as much as possible to facilitate and reduce the costs of pumping the water out of them into the fields. The consequence of this was that the ground became over-saturated and, in the absence of appropriate drainage, this caused a complex chemical chain reaction that ultimately altered the quality of the soil in many areas. He added that better drainage alone would not help especially since some types of soil were too clayey and, also, traditional drainage canals were too small -- no deeper than 50-70 centimetres. The only solution, therefore, was to keep the water table at least two metres below ground surface. Towards this end, in its future endeavours, the Ministry of Public Works should introduce the deep canal system so as to lower the water table to the lowest technically and economically feasible level. Where old irrigation systems existed and could not be immediately changed, the ministry should dig deep drainage ditches between 150 to 200 centimetres deep. "Adopting this suggestion would be particularly useful in such areas with insufficient drainage, such as Menoufiya and Qalyubiya." At the same time, he recommends, other types of drainage systems should be studied. The "covered drainage canals" in particular, seemed to offer considerable advantages.

On the same subject, under the headline, "Egyptian soil saturated with water", Al-Ahram published excerpts from the lectures of Abdel-Fattah Nour, director of the Department of Technological Agriculture in the Ministry of Agriculture; Mohamed Abdallah Zaghlul, specialist in horticulture, Ministry of Agriculture; and Ali Fathi, former dean of the School of Arts and Crafts. The first of these cautioned that the existing drainage network was incapable of disposing of the excess irrigation water and cleansing the soil up to more than 80-100 centimetres from the surface. Like Youssef Milad, he urges maintaining the water level in irrigation canals at less than two metres below ground surface. After expressing his despair at the lack of attempts to rectify the situation in many areas currently under cultivation, he appeals to the Agricultural Engineers Organisation to undertake thorough studies of future agricultural projects before implementing them.

Zaghlul delved into complicated technical details, the ultimate conclusion of which was that there was no single rule that could be applied to the question of over-saturated soil. "The great complexity of the composition of soil layers causes considerable variation in the course of water runoff from one place to the next. Even a drainage ditch fully compliant with the highest technical specifications and located next to the road could prove ineffective."

The third lecturer pointed out that in India, which had the same problem, a specialised irrigation research department had performed exhaustive studies on all aspects of irrigation systems. In the course of these studies, its researchers conducted extensive ground surveys and soil analyses, determined the areas that would or would not be suitable for sustained irrigation and identified the crops that would be best grown in each area. The studies further examined various drainage techniques and methods of reclaiming land that had been spoiled or rendered fallow because of poor irrigation. The Indian research department also issued several recommendations, including the convention of an international conference on irrigation to be held every two or three years, placing agricultural activities and the training of farmers under full government supervision and improving communications and cooperation between the various agricultural and irrigation authorities.

With this paper, Al-Ahram closed its file on the first Egyptian Agricultural Conference which, had it been held several years earlier, may have averted many of the problems that its participants raised.

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A field ignored