EGYPT TODAY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 793, 1 October 1954, Page 12

EGYPT TODAY

EGYPT AT MID-CENTURY, an Keonomic Survey by Charles Issawi; Oxford University Press, English price 21/-. ‘THE population of Egypt may number 20,000,000 people, but nobody is very sure of this, for the census returns are not sufficiently accurate-for example in the 1947 census, "it is probable that many inhabitants filled in their forms wrongly in the hope of getting extra ration cards." This type of form-filling and statistical uncertainty is characteristic of many countries, and particularly of those countries wheré a poor Government service is combined with nearfeudalism. In this case it is a country where poverty has been getting worse. Although the author says there are fewer blind people-there were 86,000 in 1937, against 75,000 in 1947--he also points out that the working capacity of the Egyptian labourer, measured by the volume of earth dug out per day, has fallen by 25 to 30 per cent since the First World War. The loss of vitality is directly due to poverty and disease; (continued on next page)

this can also be seen from the deaths from tuberculosis (30,000 Egyptians die of it every year) and from the fact that three-quarters of the rural population have bilharzia, a very debilitating disease carried by the snails in the canal waters. Three out ef four Egyptians over the age of five can neither read nor write. This, as the author shrewdly remarks, is because education, like industry, lacks a market, If Egypt could develop industries which could find markets in north-eastern Africa,’ if the landlord class could be overthrown (that is, if there were a social revolution), if the administration could be rid. of corruption, if the economic power of the merchants could. be eliminated--then, suggests the author, there need not be chaos in the Middle East. The book is a careful analytic survey (without going deeply into analysis which would get the writer into hot water) of the last century and a half of Egyptian history with up-to-date descriptive chapters on resources; agriculture, industry, transport, finance and _ the balance of payments. It ends'with a plea for the Western world to recognise that it is the middle class which should be trusted in Egypt, and carefully explains that the present army dictatorship is one of the middle-class and not of the land

owners.

W.B.

S.