An Economic study of land Reclamation in Egypt
Abstract: ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
• Mansoura Journal of Agricultural Economics and Social Sciences, Mansoura University, Vol.(5), No.(3), Mansoura, Egypt, March 2014.
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The study aims at analyzing the role of land reclamation in agricultural development in Egypt. The research utilized the descriptive techniques and relied on secondary date published by the central agency of public mobilization and statistics and ministry of agriculture and land reclamation.
The study concluded that the government started the land reclamation program after the revolution in 1952. The total reclaimed area during the period 1952-2012 reached 3.308 million acres. The 1982/1983-1986/1987 five year development plan achieved 29.8% of the targeted area while the successive plan 1987/1988-1991/1992 achieved 113.4 of the targeted area. The 1992/1993-1996/1997 plan achieved 67% of the targeted area and the following plan of 1997/1998-2001/2002 achieved 22.8% and the 2002/2003-2006/2007 plan achieved 40.6%. The last five year plan 2007/2008-2011/2012 achieved 22.6%.
The study showed that the government goal is to reclaim 3.4 million acres by the end of 2030, to increase the populated area of the current level of 5.5% of the total area of Egypt to about 25%. The Salam Canal project is the most important land reclamation projects in the next stage. The target of the project is to reclaim about 2.186 million acres which represent about 63.5 % of the total land area targeted until 2030. Toshka project is the second largest project and targets about 600 000 acres. The reclamation project of the Western Desert and Sinai comes in the third place where 507 000 acres are targeted. In the fourth place comes the project of the Greater Cairo area and Alexandria area which targets 148000 acres. Salam Canal and Toshka projects depend on the Nile River as a source for irrigation, while the Western Sahara and Sinai depends on groundwater, and the Greater Cairo and Alexandria area projects depends on treated wastewater.
The study showed that the government distributed the desert land on retiree from the armed forces the families of martyrs, small farmers, graduates of colleges and institutes, retired government employees and investors.
The study concluded that the new lands will contribute about 62.9 % to the green area, palm trees and woody trees. Moreover, it will add 54.2% to the area planted with oilseed crops, and 41.7% to the area planted with vegetable crops, 0.31 % to the area planted with leguminous crops, 24.7 % to the area planted with onions and garlic, 24.5 % to the area planted with medicinal and aromatic plants, 16.2 % to the area of fodder crops, 16.1% to the area of sugar crops, 14.7 % to the area of cereal crops, 2.6% to the area of fiber crops. Therefore, the project will contribute to food security in Egypt and improve the agricultural trade balance, and create new job opportunities which will reduce the unemployment rate.
The study, also, concluded that, increase in the value of net farm income in the reclaimed areas from 996 million pounds, which represents about 4.9% of the total value of net farm income in 1991, to about 39.1 billion pounds, representing about 21.8 % of the total value of net farm income in 2011.the Net income value of the reclaimed areas has been increasing at an annual average of 11.9 % during the period 1991-2011.
The study recommends the provision of infrastructure and public services (Transportation - markets - Bakeries - Schools - houses of worship - health clinics and veterinary - Security - entertainment facilities - etc. ) in the new Territories before urging settlers to move to the new areas to assure their stability. Also it is recommended to pay attention to the manufacturing of agricultural products to increase the value added and reduce postharvest losses. The study also recommended to more accurately selecting beneficiaries of the new areas, and determining the size of farms in accordance with the productive efficiency of the agricultural land on the one hand and the current and future investing capacity of the beneficiary.
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URL
Publication year 2014
Availability location مكتبة كلية الزراعة - جامعة المنصورة - المنصورة، الدقهلية، مصر.
Availability number
Organization Name
City الدقهلية
serial title مجلة الاقتصاد الزراعي والعلوم الاجتماعية
Web Page
Author(s) from ARC
Publication Type Journal
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