SINAYER, Egypt — Here in the timeless lushness of the Nile Valley, where peasants in flowing robes pour the river's life-giving waters onto the dark, silty soil to bring forth a bounty of cotton, dates and corn, trouble is coming.
It is not a plague of locusts or a flood, perils these lands have known since the time of the pharaohs.
No, it is a piece of modernizing legislation--call it Adam Smith comes to Egypt--introducing the startling notions that landowners should have a say over who works their property and that they should have the right to receive market-value rent.
For Egypt's peasants, the humble fellaheen, these are strange times. In the 1950s and '60s, during the rule of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, when socialist ideals marched triumphant across the Third World, they were promised low, government-set rents and tenure for themselves and their heirs on the land.
Forty years later, the pendulum has swung. The reigning philosophy now is free-market economics, and long-suffering landowners are eager to get back control of their property.
The fellaheen--a pillar of Egyptian tradition--see the new law as a threat to their very existence.
"We won't leave the land, and we will slaughter them if they come to take it," threatened Mohammed Ali, a tenant farmer in Sinayer, a village in Beni Suef province three hours' drive south of Cairo.
In the past, farmers such as Ali might have counted on Egypt's fabled inertia to ensure that nothing would change. But now, they are confronting a government bent on accelerating market reforms with an alacrity that some might deem un-Egyptian: Officials are racing to privatize businesses, reclaim desert land, upgrade the infrastructure and attract foreign investors.
The government, which estimates that its policies led to 5% growth in the 1996 gross domestic product, now dreams of becoming the economic tiger of the Mediterranean.
So it is no wonder that in the countryside, emotions are boiling, blood has been spilled--at least seven people have been killed in rioting--and the law's opponents are warning of a peasant uprising if the measure takes effect as scheduled Oct. 1.
The new law was aimed at rectifying an anti-owner bias in Nasser's sweeping land reforms. Until Nasser, Egyptian agriculture had been characterized by a quasi-feudal system in which large estates were worked by impoverished peasants whose livelihood depended on the whim of the owners and their overseers.
