The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 146)

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The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 146)

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130
susceptibility to the market price fluctuations as his need to pay cash, to meet his
obligations, mcreased.
Again, this role of the dependence on price fluctuations is ignored when the
debt of the peasants is reduced, as Hakim does, to primarily behavioral factors and
assumed inherent characteristics of peasants as manifested in “ignorance” and for
“being generally not far-sighted.”** Again, this tendency to blame the victims
ignores the structural basis of debt: the combined and cumulative impact of the
price fluctuations, the abrupt increased monetization of the primarily subsistence
economy that was mainly reflected on the peasants by the imposition of the tax in
cash, and, in the case of tenants, the increased demand for money rent, and hence
the need to borrow money in bad times. Moreover, peasants had to face the
competition from agricultural imports, to be discussed later, and in certain years,
bad harvests.
Many of the government reports investigating the Arab agricultural
conditions, starting from the late 1920s and into the 1930s, have recommended,
among other measures, the provision by the government of credit to peasants. In
its turn, the government did provide loans totaling about £P 1,763,000*° from
1919 to 1945, excluding the amounts extended to citrus farmers, which amounted
to about £P 3,659,000* (of which 47 percent went to Arab growers and 53
“Hakim in Himadeh, 497.
“Survey I, 349, 353.
Tbid., 355.
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The Dispossession of the Peasantry

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المنشئ

Riyad Mousa

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