This study focuses on the challenges facing governments of North Africa (Algeria Egypt Libya Morocco Sudan and Tunisia) in realizing the common development objective of food self-sufficiency from domestic production. There is a disequilibrium between the demand for food and domestic supply. Sustained high rates of agricultural growth and increases in the real income per person working in agriculture have not occurred. These conditions are likely to continue. The evidence suggests that reduced inequality of land distribution would increase the benefits of agricultural growth to poor farmers and would cause poverty to decline. The degree of inequality in the size distribution of land explains only 4% of the variation in agricultural gross domestic product growth rates in a sample of 20 developing countries. In Egypt land reform has contributed to a redistribution of property and the proportion living in poverty declined from 56.1% in 1951 to 17.8% in 1982. The decline is due to controls on the rent payments among 66% of landowners earnings from nonland assets (livestock) and nonfarm activities and remittances from labor migration. Quality of life is more likely to be improved with a more egalitarian structure. North African governments have not adequately solved the problems of food insecurity and rural development. The rising fundamentalist Islamic principles will probably influence policy through the application of moral human conduct. How ethical principles of social welfare will reform agricultural credit land mortgage property rights to land and protection of entitlements of the rural poor is yet to be seen. Over the past 40 years changes in land distribution have benefitted the fellaheen. Agricultural extension programs in North Africa aim to improve the role of women as housewives and mothers but not as farmers. Governments are committed to a public investment in agriculture. Limited information suggests that private investment in agriculture is constrained by cumbersome bureaucratic procedure. State power rests in control of irrigation and state farms which affect longterm gains. Foreign investment concentrates on high profit small risk endeavors and export crops.