The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 311)

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عنوان

The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 311)

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295
whether in terms of loans or taxation. The relatively substantial growth in cash
crops, including the increased use of wage labor, implies increased differentiation
in the rural areas.
The increased production for the local market and for export meant an
increased vulnerability to fluctuations in world prices. This had consequences for
all cultivators, regardless of size, as we saw in the case of citrus. However, it was
most ruimous for the small peasants whose level of consumption was now
determined to an important extent by market prices and after meeting their cash
obligations of taxes and debt.
In addition to the role of nature and fluctuations in prices, some of the
government’s trade and tariff policies made matters worse, especially for the small
peasants. Those policies were often not only contradictory but also showed
preference to European settlers at the expense of the small Arab peasant. There
were the cases where the government provided tariff exemptions to European
manufacturers on the import of raw materials available locally. That had the impact
of not only lowering the price of, for example, olive oil, a major source of income
for many peasants, but also undermined the local traditional soap manufacturing
and its exports. More detrimental was the government’s free trade agreement with
Syria, which primarily exported the same agricultural products available in
Palestine, but its impact was most deeply felt in the case of cereals that were
produced at lower costs in Syria and where natural conditions were more
favorable. That trade agreement nullified most, if not all, of the benefits of the
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The Dispossession of the Peasantry

تاريخ

٢٠٠٦

المنشئ

Riyad Mousa

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