ABU MINQAR: Residents of the tiny desert oasis of Abu Minqar call it "the farthest place from Egypt. It is a remote and quiet place on the edge of the Great Sand Sea, far from the noise, pollution and crowds of Egypt's major cities and the high population density of the Nile Valley. The government created this green stretch of wheat fields and lemon trees in 1987 as part of a long-standing program to reclaim the desert for agricultural use by drilling wells to the vast aquifer beneath it. Before then, Abu Minqar was just another sandy valley in the bleak moonscape that surrounds it for hundreds of kilometers. Adel Mansour Mahdy, 24, has lived here since the settlement's early days. His family came here from Dakhla oasis when he was seven, enticed by a government incentives program meant to draw settlers into the Sahara. In Dakhla, Adel's family eked out a hard living on a tiny plot of land with no steady water supply. Today, he grows wheat, rice, alfalfa and citrus on his own five acre plot, while renting five more and planting on six acres of nearby public land. He and others like him are known as muntafa'een - "beneficiaries - of that incentives scheme, called the "Mubarak Project. Under the project, the government offers reclaimed desert land to landless peasants, small investors and university graduates who agree to sign away their right to a job in bloated state bureaucracies. It draws them away from the relative luxury of urban Egypt by building villages from scratch. In Abu Minqar, it built rows of simple two-room cement homes, roads and gravel paths, electric lines and a rough network of canals to bring well water to the fields. The Mubarak Project allots each family a house and between two and a half and six acres of land, for which they pay a mortgage of LE 200 ($35) to LE 300 ($52) a year for 20 to 30 years. In Abu Minqar, the plan has lured 4,000 people to make a new life for themselves in the desert. Desert land reclamation has been one of Egypt's major domestic policy objectives for more than half a century. Today almost one quarter of the 8 million acres under cultivation here was once part of the Sahara, which covers 96 percent of the country's area. Egypt uses the land reclamation and resettlement programs in tandem, say experts, to increase the amount of cultivable land in the country as well as to find a creative solution to chronic problems of overcrowding and unemployment. Unemployment here is officially marked at 10.3 percent, but widely considered to be much higher. "The trend in Egyptian policy has been to expand in to the desert as a way to push the country's problems in to the desert, said Jessica Pouchet, a researcher at the Desert Development Center (DDC) at the American University in Cairo. "Egypt has been trying to turn the desert into a solution for some of its problems. Experts say that by many measures these dual programs have been successful, although on the ground problems remain. In Abu Minqar, villagers say they are happy to have their land, but complain of government neglect, lingering poverty and corruption. Adel says his family back in Dakhla envies his successful harvests, but life in Abu Minqar can be hard. "Of course I like living here, because I have lived here for a long time, he says, walking through an orchard of short lemon trees with a foreign visitor. "In Dakhla people think Abu Minqar is better, but here we think life is better in Dakhla, he adds. "There is a big gap between the people and the government here. Twenty years after the government brought Adel's family and many others out to settle in the area, they say it has failed to provide them with basic necessities like clean water and reliable electricity. Adel says that without clean drinking water, he gives his two young daughters tainted water he has filtered through a clay jug called a zir. It is an ancient practice which has long since been abandoned in the country's developed centers. Electricity is available only a few hours each night here, and none of the settlement's six tiny villages have adequate clinics or secondary schools. To treat an illness or attend a high school, villagers must travel through hundreds of kilometers of rocky desert. Living without government services so far from Egypt's urban centers, Cairo and the powers-that-be seem abstract and distant to the villagers here. "There is a big difference between here and Cairo, said Ali Yassin Maraie, who moved to Abu Minqar from Giza as a child in 1987. He farms wheat and beans here, and also sells vegetables and fish he buys at a weekly market in another oasis 100 km away. "The government doesn't do anything for us here. It was supposed to line our canals with cement, but it didn't, he says with evident frustration. The lack of cement lining in canals is a serious source of water waste, say experts, leading to absorption in the soil and increased evaporation. "Abu Minqar is far from the eyes of the government, he adds. "They don't pay any attention to us. The most prominent role the state plays in villagers' lives is through the local Agricultural Development Bank, which distributes fertilizer to the farmers and buys their wheat crop in bulk to sell outside the oasis. Without the bank it would be much harder to sell wheat, the area's main cash crop, and without fertilizer it would not grow at all. But Ali and other villagers say that the bank hordes fertilizer to create a black market in the tiny community. Bankers make a profit selling the supplies to merchants from outside Abu Minqar, who then sell it to villagers for two or three times its original price. "Living here is no comfort in our lives, and there is no one for us to complain to about our problems, says Ali. "In Cairo they have a government, but out here, there is no government at all. To overcome these hurdles, farmers in the oasis have banded together in an independent Farmer's Association. The Association organizes projects the farmers could not accomplish alone, such as renting heavy machinery to clean canals or buying medicine in bulk for livestock. Only one year old, it has already attracted almost two-thirds of the residents. "I think that we have a lot of problems here and if we work together we can solve some of them, says Magdy Mubaraz Ibrahim, the head of the Association. His family worked as share croppers in another oasis until they came here 20 years ago, but now he cultivates 12 acres of his own land. Experts from the Desert Development Center at AUC, who work with the Farmer's Association, say its very existence is a demonstration of the optimism of the oasis. "With the farmer's association, a lot of people are saying 'forget the government, we have to do this by ourselves,' says Tina Jaskolski, a researcher at the DDC who has spent over a year working in the oasis. "These people all moved here to make a new life for themselves, and they have kind of a frontier mentality, adds Jaskolski. "I think that will to make it work is a big part of what does make it work. Despite the hardships here, Magdy is happy he moved out to the desert years ago. There is more space here, he says, and in a country where the government is more often criticized for being heavy handed than aloof, there are advantages to life on the frontier. "My cousins who still live in Dakhla say we have a better life here, and I think they are right, he says. "A lot of people in Dakhla have to deal with the government, and it makes their lives hard. But out here we can plant whatever we want, and do whatever we want. Here we are free.
