The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 289)

غرض

عنوان
The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 289)
المحتوى
273
[was] not large enough to balance or outweigh [the wages received] on account of
hiring out.”
As already noted, the 1931 Census accounted for 25 percent of all earners
in “pasture and agriculture” as “farm servants, field laborers, and watchers” (i.e.,
agricultural laborers) but represented 29.4 percent of those engaged in extensive
cereal cultivation. Amazingly, the 1929 survey of 104 villages also found that of
those engaged in extensive cereal cultivation, 29.4 percent were laborers. After
1930, the number of wage laborers as measured in man-days must have increased
because of the relatively substantial increase in cash crops. Up to 1939, the same
may be said about a relative increase in agricultural wage labor. However, whether
agricultural wage labor increased relative to the other strata involved in agriculture
is uncertain for the period 1940-1945. This is because a large number of poor
peasants and formerly agricultural laborers were now employed in nonagricultural
wage labor during WWII. In 1944, a government committee estimated that the
Arab agricultural workforce was reduced by 47,000 males since 1939.° We do
not know how many of those were employed as agricultural wage laborers before
1939.
Nonetheless, many of those villagers were now primarily or solely
dependent on wage labor and could not be “reabsorbed” in agriculture. Many had
lost their land while others who still owned a small piece of land could not subsist
*8Patnaik, Class Differentiation, A835.
*°Taqqu, 265.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
تاريخ
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المنشئ
Riyad Mousa

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