Egypt has, for the last two decades, been encouraging university graduates to leave the city and grow food on dry, uncultivated land.

It all began, 20 years ago, in Egypt’s capital, Cairo.

A national newspaper announced that the government was trying to solve the unemployment problem for young graduates – and there were several options. One was to take out a government loan and start a business, another was to get a car. The third option… to buy some cheap farmland that you repaid over 30 years.

The country is aiming to reclaim about 150,000 acres of land each year.

Throughout the desert, east and west of Cairo, dozens of villages are made up of some 40,000 graduates who’ve taken the chance to come to farm.

Despite some stumbles, they’ve reclaimed about a million acres of land, and passed on newfound technical skills to the locals who already eked a living in this harsh terrain. With help from the government and abroad, they’ve started schools, clinics and water reclamation plants.

Despite their successes, the government has now decided not to renew its experiment in helping willing graduates back to the land, unless they have agriculture degrees and are willing to join forces with larger investors.

As for millions of other graduates across the world, who can’t yet find decent work in the global economy, unless other countries follow Egypt’s example, they may have to wait for their own fairytale to begin.

Excerpted from an article by Steve Bradshaw for BBC News

An ambitious $100 million canal project to bring water from the Nile river to the Toshka desert 225 km south of Aswan in Egypt to convert arid regions into farmland and boost animal production has been completed.

The Sheikh Zayed Canal project, funded by the Abu Dhabi government, is part of a bigger human settlement plan that aims to construct all modern civic amenities in the desert.

The grant was mainly used in the construction of the canal, three irrigation stations and development of farmland.

The canal has a capacity to irrigate about 100,000 acres within the integrated irrigation system envisaged for the development of the southern valley covering over 24 km.

As part of the larger project, farms, irrigation and road network, agricultural facilities and buildings, laboratories, factories and other amenities will be built.

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For generations, Egypt has been a country to leave. It has long been stingy with opportunity, and its people have become exports to countries in need of laborers. Five million Egyptians work as bricklayers, carpenters and in any other jobs they can find in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and, for those with professions, Europe and the United States.

About 40% of Egyptians live on $2 a day or less. If it weren’t for the estimated $6 billion to $8 billion sent home every year by workers abroad, the nation would barely survive.

In the 1970s and ’80s, the money Egyptians earned in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations built new neighborhoods in Cairo. The laborers worked in Israel, and in Iraq before the war. These days they disperse across the region on ferries and buses. Others pay smugglers and hop on ragged vessels that sail across the Mediterranean toward Europe. Many drown with borrowed money in their wallets.

Excerpted from an article by Jeffrey Fleishman and Amro Hassan for the Los Angeles Times

Rice, a staple of the Egyptian diet, is normally grown on some 486,000 hectares of Egypt’s 3.2 million hectares of agricultural land. This year, farmers grew rice on an additional 162,000 hectares of land. Agriculture experts say that 0.404 hectares (one acre) of rice produces two tons of hay, meaning the country accumulated 3.2 million tons of hay this year.

Some of the hay is used as feed for livestock but experts say more than 60 percent is burned before the new planting season.

But this is not without cost to Egyptians who either live in the capital or around the farms. When rice straw burning occurs, millions of residents must travel in poor visibility on the roads and many use masks to reduce the effect of the smog.

The Ministry of Environment said it has made progress in curbing the black cloud. “The cloud appeared only 40 hours this year instead of 190 hours last year,” Ahmed Abul Soud, chairman of the Air Quality Unit in the ministry, said. “We’re trying to end it, but it will take some time.”

Sceptics say the smog will never disappear if the government’s focus is only on limiting rice-straw burning and not on tackling other causes of pollution in the city, such as that from vehicles.

According to the UN Environment Programme, in normal times the average Cairo resident ingests more than 20 times the acceptable level of air pollution, and this year the problem is also being exacerbated by the incineration of mounds of rubbish abandoned in the streets – an indirect consequence of the May 2009 pig cull.

IRIN

Egyptian cotton…seems as oxymoronic as English tea or Irish coffee. Ancient Egypt used linen and flax not cotton, both for the living and the dead. But Egyptian cotton is the new wonder fabric from an antique land, and unlike Egyptian linen, its magic has not been hidden and forgotten in pyramids for centuries.

Mohammed Ali Pasha is the one who had the foresight to introduce a wonderful long staple cotton to his country’s farmers in the Nile delta in the 1820s that catapulted them to the top of the quality ladder. Adroit timing also ensured that cotton from Egypt captured the British mill industry when the US stopped exporting their raw cotton during the Civil War. Piquantly, the cotton plant used by the Egyptians is a native American variety — Gossypium barbadense — but it has clearly taken to the sun and sand of the Nile.

Most items that do use Egyptian cotton display that fact very prominently as it is a beacon for quality (and luxury) hunters. The most wonderful and satisfying characteristic of this cotton is that the more it is washed the softer it gets and it never develops nubbles or lumps or gives off lint. That is because its strands are at least double the length of other cotton varieties. Yet, despite its fineness, there is a tough core, thanks to the long strands of cotton, that makes it resistant to wear and, especially, tear.

Nowadays, whether it is a shirt, dress, bedsheet or towel, the words ‘Finest Egyptian Cotton’ not only guarantee unbelievable softness and absorbency but also tough resilience.

Excerpted from an article by Reshmi R Dasgupta for The Economic Times

The Coptic calendar, the oldest in history, had been in existence for at least three millennia before Christ. Indeed, what today is termed the Coptic Christian calendar is essentially derived from earlier models of ancient Egyptian measurements of time. Ironically, all the current names of the Coptic months retain something of their original ancient Egyptian meanings — invariably associated with non-Christian Egyptian deities — thereby betraying their pre-Christian origins.

The Coptic calendar harks back to the days when the vast majority of Egyptians lived off the land, tilling the fertile Nile Valley and harvesting an abundance of crops. The measurement of time was closely associated with regulating farm-related activities. The measurement of time was also closely linked with astrology and mathematics. The division of the day into 24 hours was an ancient Egyptian concept, as were the concepts of a month and a year. And for the past five millennia at least, the Egyptian year has had 13 months.

Tradition ascribes the invention of the Coptic calendar to Imhotep, the supreme vizier, chief architect, physician, physicist and mathematician. Imhotep, whose name means the Harbinger of Peace. Unlike the Western, or Gregorian calendar, the Coptic calendar divides the year into three and not four seasons. The Egyptian months and seasons were inextricably intertwined with agriculture and the ebb and flow of the River Nile. The three seasons are the first, Inundation, or Akhet — the first season which marks the beginning of the year; second, Peret, the Planting or Sowing Season (winter); and last, Shemu, the Harvest (summer). The Sowing and Inundation seasons each has four months, while the Harvest has five. And since time immemorial, Egyptian farming communities have organized agricultural activities on the basis of these three seasons and 13 months.

Some months of the Coptic calendar are more revered than others, but there is a tradition that holds that all the year’s months are blessed. Significantly, the first month of the Coptic calendar is named in honor of the ancient Egyptian scribe-god, the so-called Thrice-Great Thoth, or Djihouti. Touba, the fifth month of the Coptic calendar, was in the distant pre-Christian past associated with the god Amun-Ra. The seventh month of the Coptic calendar, Baramhat, ushers in Spring. Baramhat is the month associated with the sun god Montu, the god of war in ancient Egypt.

Excerpted from an article by Gamal Nkrumah for Al-Ahram