Algeria's "Agrarian Revolution:" Peasant Control or Control of Peasants?

Abstract

A virtual crisis in Algerian agriculture has been experienced since the early 1950s. This crisis, which has its roots in the dislocations created by the seizure of the best lands by the French and the implantation of the colon regime of agriculture since the conquest of 1832, has been primarily a crisis of underproduction. The war of national liberation, which was fought primarily in the rural areas of the nation, the forced regroupment by the French army of approximately two million people during the war, and the massive destruction of livestock and of farm and forest lands resulting from the eight year war exacerbated the problem of underproduction. The relative contribution of agriculture to the GNP in 1954 was 34 percent, for example; whereas in 1968 it dropped to 15 percent, declining to less than 10 percent in the early 1970s (Viratelle, 1974: 196). The failure after 1962 of the post-revolutionary governments to stimulate agricultural production adequately or to create new or additional rural jobs helps to explain the constant decline in the peasant contribution to the Algerian GNP and to the development of the country after independence. A massive rural-urban exodus also continues unabated. Approximately one hundred thousand farmers leave the lands, the villages, and small towns of the Algerian countryside each year swelling the already overcrowded cities of the north. This exodus, though not a recent development, has not been arrested in a sector where unemployment in the early 1970s reached one out of two persons (Ammour et al., 1974: 78). The magnet of escape valve that France has traditionally offered to the unemployed, the upwardly mobile, and the desperate among Algeria's peasantry and urban sub-proletariat, only accounts for approximately 25 thousands Algerian emigres each year to the former metropolis and to other Common Market countries (Mallarde, 1975: 208). These trends could be discounted only to the detriment of Algeria's heavy industrialization program in 1971. They almost forced the Boumediene government to act. In spite of these trends, agriculture still provided employment to three out of four employed Algerians in the summer of 1972 when the government actually launched the Agrarian Revolution (Viratelle, 1974: 143). Instead of revising its development priorities by recognizing the centrality of agriculture, the government reduced the projected expenditure of funds for the agrarian sector. The First FourYear Plan (1970-73), for example, assigned 16 percent of all development funds