Regulating Agricultural Production and Supply

From the outset of the war, Allied officials feared the consequences of wartime shipping disruptions on Middle East food supplies among local populations and struggled to balance the equally urgent need to provide for both civilian and military consumption. Allied assessments of regional food production identified inefficiencies in the distribution of food across the region: surpluses in one country were not available to redress shortages in a neighboring state, typically due to a simple lack of adequate transport. These studies found a reliance on imports in countries that showed the potential to be self-sufficient, and underscored the widespread use of practices deemed threatening to the stability of large urban areas: the hoarding of crops by villagers and of basic commodities by urban dwellers, price gouging by urban merchants, and smuggling of crops to areas outside the control of Allied forces (especially from Syria to Turkey). When combined with the volatility of harvests due to natural fluctuations in rainfall, and restrictions on the export of scarce goods from the United Kingdom to the Middle East, the conditions encountered by MESC officials when they set up shop in the region in mid-1941 were nothing short of dire.

In Syria and Lebanon, in particular, mass famine was a real possibility, and this threat led MESC officials operating within the Spears Mission to adopt a particularly heavy-handed approach to the management of agricultural production and supply. During its first season of operation, hoarding and speculating had led to severe grain shortages. The initial response of MESC staff was to flood the markets with low-priced wheat. More than one hundred thousand tons of wheat originally destined for Europe was diverted to the Levant “to induce speculators and hoarders to unload their stocks.”^[58] But as Spears admitted, “The absorptive capacity of the hoarders was underestimated.” Imported wheat was bought up as soon as it hit local markets, and prices immediately returned to their speculative levels.^[59]

In the face of this failure, MESC staff in the Levant abandoned market-based methods of price management and moved to impose a thorough control regime that governed the entire grain economy of Syria and Lebanon, bringing with it a raft of regulatory and interventionist practices that rapidly became consolidated within local state structures. To oversee this effort, the Spears Mission created an agency known as the Wheat and Cereals Office (also called the Office des céréales panifiables, or OCP), which included representatives from Syria, Lebanon, France, and England.^[60] The inclusion of local representatives had implications that reached well beyond a challenge to French authority. This step made Syrian and Lebanese bureaucrats responsible for the regulation of their own agricultural economies, socialized them into the administrative culture of the Spears Mission, and provided training in the management of large-scale regulatory enterprises—expertise that technocrats such as ‘Izzat Tarabulsi, one of several Syrians appointed to MESC agencies, later placed at the disposal of the postwar Syrian state.

Under OCP auspices, a centralized system of grain collection, transport, processing, and distribution was created, prefiguring the apparatus of food control that developed in independent Syria. Its tasks included everything from acquiring the foreign exchange needed to purchase grains, to equipping the OCP with trucks, sacks, and weighing equipment. The OCP became the monopsony purchaser of Syrian wheat, with prices fixed by MESC economists. To ensure compliance with directives that restricted the sale of wheat to the OCP, it created a dense network of village and district level committees to determine local grain requirements and develop estimates of grain production. Even the transport of wheat required a license in an effort to curtail smuggling.

As might be expected, the politics of managing Syria’s food supply were hugely contentious. Damascus was a site of particular unrest.^[61] Riots and protests were commonplace as MESC officials struggled to determine how much wheat Damascus really needed. Rumors abounded that MESC was skimming Syrian grain for British troops. Mobs collected outside bakeries whose owners sold bread made from adulterated flour. Absentee landowners and grain dealers, whose profits were threatened by OCP’s practice of direct cash purchases of wheat from peasants, encouraged noncompliance with OCP collection efforts.

To cope with these circumstances the OCP gradually expanded its reach, essentially nationalizing a number of bakeries and nine flour mills. Spears induced Syria’s prime minister Husni al-Barazi to become a local advocate of grain collection. Barazi traveled throughout Syria with an OCP delegation, urging landowners and peasants to sell their wheat. Implicit in his pleas was the threat of coercive collection by French forces if they did not comply. Soon, “knowledge of the risk involved in flouting the authority of the O.C.P. . . . percolated to the remotest corners of Syria,” and it was able to buy wheat at the rate of three thousand tons per day.^[62]

Alongside this enormous administrative apparatus, MESC constructed an entirely new bureaucracy for the collection of demographic and agricultural data. From the outset, MESC officials recognized that the work of the OCP would founder without adequate census information, of which only the most rudimentary was then available. They believed, accurately, that existing population counts dramatically overstated urban populations, to the detriment of the countryside. Local committees were unwilling or unable to direct new population counts. Early efforts to manage grain distribution in Lebanon through a system of ration cards had proven ineffective (Spears claimed that the prime minister of Lebanon held seventy-three ration cards). In response, OCP staff created a statistical agency (Bureau de statistiques et de liaison), with the mandate to undertake nationwide census counts and detailed crop estimates in Syria and Lebanon.

These were to be the first “modern” censuses in the history of the Levant, and they proved no less contentious than any other aspect of this enterprise. In spring 1942, separate censuses were conducted throughout Syria and Lebanon, with urban areas placed under curfew to ensure an accurate count. As Spears recalled, “The O.C.P. census of the Syrian towns produced some astonishing results. Damascus and Aleppo, taken together, revealed an overestimate of 96,000 souls, and Deir ez Zor proved to have a population of only 28,000 instead of 65,000. When it was learnt in Homs that a census was soon to be made by British and French officers under curfew conditions, panic-stricken householders immediately registered 5,000 new deaths at the municipal office; even excluding this sudden decrease, the new figures were 18 per cent. lower than those of the previous census.”^[63] Counting was accompanied by the formal registration of households to permit the implementation of a food-rationing scheme—information that was later used in Syria to revise lists of eligible voters.

With new population figures in hand, wheat provisions to Damascus were cut. Rioting broke out to pressure the Syrian government to increase the city’s allocation. An OCP decision to reduce the “ration of the wealthier classes [in Damascus] . . . to the level prevailing elsewhere” also prompted riots in March 1942. As with other aspects of the food supply program, popular mobilization against intervention led MESC not to cut back, but to broaden its role. With the Syrian government unwilling to assume responsibility for an unpopular rationing system, the role of the Bureau de statistiques et de liaison “evolved first from liaison into supervision and [then became] one of direct control” of the entire wheat distribution scheme.^[64]

By the time Spears wrote his memorandum to the Foreign Office in June 1943, he was able to claim that the OCP’s efforts had been a resounding success. He took credit for averting famine and for giving Syria and Lebanon “a taste of honest and efficient administration which were conditions totally unknown there.” He expressed his hope that local governments would eventually develop an “attachment to the scheme.”^[65] In Syria, the government certainly did.

“Wars pass,” wrote Guy Hunter, a historian of MESC, “but economic problems do not.”^[66] Syrian politicians were no less concerned than officials of the Spears Mission about the imperative necessity to ensure food security, especially for highly mobilized urban populations. Following the war, the OCP was absorbed into the Syrian bureaucracy, as were several other agencies created by MESC to manage food production and supply. For a short period, a small number of British technical experts stayed on, but over time the functions of OCP agencies were absorbed into a range of ministries, from the Ministry of Economy to the Ministries of Agriculture and Supply, and managed entirely by Syrians. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and quite apart from their flawed and halfhearted attempts at agrarian reform, the Syrian governments of this period steadily broadened the role of the state in the agricultural economy, retaining many of the regulatory regimes first introduced by the OCP. These included price controls, marketing controls, and oversight of food distribution.^[67] The statistical and data collection capacities created by the Bureau de statistiques et de liaison supported the production of Syria’s Al-majmu‘a al-ih‘saiya (annual statistical abstract), published first by the Ministry of Economy and later by the Ministry of Planning. In general, and without exaggerating the extent to which later practices grew directly out of Syria’s wartime experience, it is clear that Syria’s postwar capacity to manage the agrarian sector has critical links to the role of MESC in the construction of a pervasive program of agrarian regulation during the war.

In Egypt, entrenched patterns of agricultural production posed two distinct and related problems for economic administrators: how to meet the increased need for food production and how to minimize the adverse effects of a drastic decline in fertilizer imports. The Egyptian economy was built around estate production of cotton for export on the world market. Unlike during World War I, however, when producers and merchants reaped the windfalls from rising wartime demand for their goods, world cotton market prices began a precipitous decline early in 1940 that indeed rocked the foundations of the political economy.^[68] Following protracted negotiations through the late spring and summer, which were bound up with the British Embassy’s intervention to remove one government presumed insufficiently loyal and secure the cooperation of a successor, British authorities agreed in August 1940 to purchase the entire domestic cotton crop.^[69] Producers planted their fields in anticipation of even greater windfalls, but in 1941 British authorities drove a harder bargain, linking its support to a system of invasive regulation of cotton production and marketing.^[70]

In this case, the wartime administration invented many of the arrangements that have since come to stand for etatism in Egyptian agriculture, including a strict currency exchange control regime, the closing of the first cotton futures market in the world, and the conversion of the state to monopsonist.^[71] According to Richards, these unprecedented policy changes contributed to undermining the one-hundred-year-old ‘izba system of estate production. From the time of the war, large landowners turned increasingly to renting out their estates for cash.^[72] The cornerstone of this new and transforming regulatory regime was a series of laws controlling cotton production by forcing growers to alter their regular pattern of crop rotation and fixing upper limits on the percentage of lands that could be planted with the traditional cash crop. Wartime officials combined these restrictions with cash incentives to farmers who shifted additional acreage to food production.

These regulations succeeded in shrinking the cultivated acreage to 50 percent of the prewar level, and, for the duration of the war, cotton trickled to rather than flooded the market.^[73] Officials continued this regime after the war, relaxing controls very briefly in 1950 before reinstating them one year later. The result was a shift in agricultural output over time, including increases in rice, sugarcane, fruits and vegetables, and the introduction of wholly new crops such as flax, jute, and sugar beet cultivation under the guidance of MESC.^[74] But, as is widely noted about the intervention, the massive shift out of cotton and into staple grains—wheat, barley, millet, and maize—was able only to offset the steep fall in yields caused by the virtual cutoff of fertilizer shipments.^[75] And the increased rate of exploitation to make up for food imports exhausted soil resources.^[76] In Egypt as in Syria, therefore, agricultural inputs and outputs were subjected to an increasing degree of control, until governments had taken over purchase and distribution of most key commodities, including fertilizers, wheat and other grains, sugar, tea, coffee, and cooking oil.^[77] And as in Syria, the spillover effects of these regulatory innovations into postwar Egyptian food policies are clearly visible.