By Samir Sobhi How many people in this country are looking for jobs? And how many jobs are done by unskilled labour? Since our farmers came to the city to look for better lives and since our workers left to the Gulf to make more money, it hasn't been a pretty picture. At some point, we will end up with too many people for the jobs we have, indeed for the cities we have. One solution is to rediscover agriculture. I recently attended a seminar moderated by Mustafa Abdel-Qader, a man who knows a lot about countryside problems having served as governor and minister of development and local administration. We discussed aid to developing countries and how it ends up getting spent on weapons instead of welfare. Then we moved on to the real issues. Why do people leave the countryside to the cities? How profitable exactly is agriculture? Which areas deserve to be reclaimed and cultivated? And do we have enough water? The countryside can be revived. It can even compete with cities in terms of the quality of life, but only if we give it a chance. The transformation of the countryside needs ideas. Tourism, for example, can help change the face of the countryside. When are we going to organise a festival at a model Egyptian village? When are we going to turn some villages into tourist destinations? Certainly, villages can host a day of fresh produce. Some villages can even offer decent accommodation, if they try. We need to start somewhere. We need to provide our agricultural land with a minimum of water supply. We need to set a minimum size for farms so as to make them more viable and easier to change hands. We need to make agriculture efficient and fashionable once more. Otherwise, our children would be asking us, "where do lemons come from?" This week's Soapbox speaker is deputy editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram .
