If you want to know how a superpower is reduced in less than a generation to something resembling the stuff of the toilets, read the New York Times because this publication has become the tool that can perform that amazing feat.
To fulfill its function, the New York Times did it again on July 21, 2008 when it published an article written by Andrew Martin under the title "Mideast Facing Choices between Crops and Water." This was one article in a series called The Food Chain where the world’s production of food was to be examined.
Martin’s article pretends to discuss the Middle East but concentrates on Egypt; pretends to talk about crops and water but sets out to denigrate Egypt. To be sure, nothing more than an irritation will be felt by the Egyptians as a result of that piece but plenty that is corrosive will happen to America – the sort of effect you get when you know that a prostitute lives next door.
When you see a title like "Mideast Facing Choices between Crops and Water," you expect to read about a tough equation the people of the region struggle to solve. In fact, many works on that subject have been published and are being published in scholarly journals and in other publications. When you read them, you know at the start that the articles will add to your insight as to how the people of the Middle East are coping with an impossible situation.
But when you get past the start of the New York Times article, you quickly realize that the paper is doing again what it has always done which is to use the subject as a springboard in order to implement the Likud edict. This is the edict which says: Never mind the subject you pretend to discuss, go ahead and heap praises on Israel, and denigrate Egypt. Do so by associating the latter with excessive religiosity, poverty, corruption or all of these.
Just look at what Martin says in his article. First he says that the Toshka farm was supposed to involve roughly 500,000 acres of farmland and tens of thousands of residents. But no one has moved there, and only 30,000 acres or so have been planted. He then tells of the farm manager who showed him fields of melon, alfalfa and rows of tomatoes and grapes. In fact, eleven pictures accompany the article showing those fields as well as a packing plant where people are seen doing the work.
In saying that only 30,000 acres have been planted, Martin deliberately gives the false impression that the project has stopped here and will never reach the 500,000 acres it was planned for. This is garbage talk because the plan is going full speed ahead with investments coming to it from many sides.
Furthermore, in saying that no one has moved there, Martin classifies as nobodies the farmers who work the fields and the people who work in the packing plants. This is so Likud-like, no one who is this fanatic about implementing their edict should be commissioned to write on a subject as important as this.
Andrew Martin goes on to say that one morning in a Cairo slum, people crammed in front of a bakery for their daily rations of subsidized bread that sells for less than a penny, so cheap that some people feed it to their livestock. But then he adds: "The bakery shares the end of a dead-end street with a mountain of garbage, 25 feet by 5 feet, that looks as if it is moving because so many flies swarm over it."
Assuming this last hyperbole to be literally true, how does it advance the point the author is making when the discussion is supposed to be about the tough equation that the people of the region struggle with to get out of a quandary as they make the choice between crops and water? The author does not say because he is really not talking about the equation; he is merely using the subject as a springboard to make that hyperbole.
But since he thought it necessary to discuss the subject of garbage, he should have explained that the Spanish garbage collection company which was contracted by the Cairo municipality to do the work started an illegal strike and caused the chaos in the streets of Cairo. However, the strike failed to cause the level of chaos that was seen in the Italian city of Milan by the garbage strike there because the Cairo municipality intervened early enough and forcefully enough to alleviate the situation.
And the author should have pointed out that feeding livestock with bread that costs virtually nothing is what contributed to the shortage of the staple in Egypt. In fact, 250 million loaves of subsidized bread are baked every day in that country supposedly to serve 20% of the population. A little calculation reveals that this comes to 16.25 loaves of bread per person. That’s a lot of dough, man! Clearly then, the apparent shortage of bread was not real but was the result of something that went wrong with the system which the government remedied in about a week.
Unaware of what Egypt’s farmers have been doing in the area of growing crops where they have a competitive advantage, Andrew Martin says that some economists have recommended that the countries in the region should grow crops like produce or flowers, which do not require much water and can be exported for top dollar.
The reality is that Egypt, which exports as much food as it imports fell into the present quandary by surprise. Rather than grow all the wheat it consumes, the country used to produce half of its need in wheat and import the other half to take advantage of the price war that erupted between the United States and the other wheat producing countries. Egypt then used the freed land and the water to grow other crops which it exported, using the income to pay for the wheat it imported. But then came the sudden increase in the price of wheat and the country was caught by surprise.
Andrew Martin skips over all of that and over the fact that Egypt helps to feed Israel as well as provide it with fuel. He also skips over the fact that only a few days ago, Egypt signed an agreement with the European Union to increase by 30% the export of Egyptian food to the countries of the Union. Instead, Martin cites the example of Doron Ovits whom he says runs a 150-acre tomato and pepper empire in the Negev Desert of Israel. His plants are irrigated with treated sewer water, says the author then remarks that: "…Israel has become the world’s leader in maximizing agricultural output per drop of water, and many believe that it serves as a viable model for other countries in the Middle East and North Africa." Not on your life, Andy.
The man commits three glaring omissions here. First, he neglects to say whether tomato grown in human pee and excrement is kosher. Second, he does not say whether or not the people in Europe who are eating the stuff know they are eating from the toilets of Israel. And third, he fails to mention that the Egyptians recycle their sewers too but they use the water to grow forests which they harvest to make furniture.
In fact, Egypt which is a desert country now produces more round wood than France and Italy put together. No wonder, Italy which used to be a leader in home furnishings and France which used to be a leader in office furnishings have both transferred many of their factories to Egypt which is fast becoming a leader in both home and office furnishings.
One more point needs to be made here. The method of water dripping and the use of computers are not the only techniques employed in modern agriculture. In fact, the modern approaches to agriculture begin before you plant the seeds. They begin with the reclamation of the land where lasers are used to level the fields and to rid them of pot holes. This is done to reduce the wasting of the water because water tends to accumulate in the pot holes and tends to run to the low end of a field that is not perfectly horizontal. A field that is totally flat and leveled uses the minimum amount of water and the plants do not suffer for it.
And when you have done all of that, you want to make sure you capture as much of the drainage water as you can which you then purify and recycle. The Egyptians do all of that with machines and techniques they helped to develop and now sell locally as well as to other countries.
Andrew Martin does not stop here in using the stereotypes that have been developed over the decades to denigrate Egypt. One stereotype is the relentless repetition of the notion that 20% of the citizens of Egypt live in poverty. The fact of the matter is that the bottom quintile in every country lives in poverty by definition. This is true in every European country as it is in North America and Asia and everywhere else. But what Martin fails to mention is that the bottom quintile in Egypt consumes more than 3,000 calories of food a day when the average consumption in Israel is less than that. This means the poorest of the poor in Egypt eats better than the average Israeli.
In fact, to solicit donations, an American rabbi called Ekstein is running infommercials on television showing the extent of despair in which some people in Israel live. The informmercials are not distinguishable from those made to solicit funds for the poorest of the poor in the most desolate regions of the Third World. Some scenes in those infommercials show places where people live inside abandoned buildings in Israel that make the garbage piled in the streets of Cairo and Milan look like paradise island.
Another stereotype used by Martin is really a fantasy developed by the Likud party of Israel. It says that under a 1959 treaty, Egypt is entitled to a disproportionate share of the Nile’s water, a point that rankles some of its neighbors. This is false. The treaty was never a point of contention among the countries bordering the Nile basin because until today, Egypt which comes at the end of the Nile’s run, still receives more than the 55 billion cubic meters allocated to it by the treaty. This means that the countries upstream are not using all that has been allocated to them let alone be rankled by what the treaty allocates to Egypt. In fact, some countries are suffering from floods due to excess water overflowing the banks of the Nile. The countries in question are now trying to remedy the situation in cooperation with Egypt that has the ideas and the technology.
Toward the end of the article, Martin quotes Richard Tutwiler of the America University in Cairo who says that Egypt is establishing 200,000 acres of farmland in the desert each year while losing 60,000 acres to urbanization. What the journalist neglects to say is that in addition to the land reclaimed in the desert, the country has embarked on a project to move to the desert the towns and villages that are strewn along the Nile so as to free up for agriculture the fertile lands they occupy. This massive project involves nearly 5,000 urban centers comprising about 3 million acres of land. When this is completed, the country will have added 50% more to its food supply, good to feed another 40 million people.
There is also the need to make one correction here. The 60,000 acres of urbanization referred to by Mr. Tutwiler are the 250 square kilometers of construction that is taking place in the country every year. While some construction is done illegally on farmland, most of it is done legally in the desert, thus the loss to agriculture is minimal.
Egypt is not being hurt by the repetition of the Likud rubbish because the only thing that repetition does is trivialize the subject it mentions. This is why people are touched by the mention of tragedies such as those which took place in Rwanda, Cambodia, Biafra, Ethiopia, Kossovo and other places but respond with a yawn at the mention of the Jewish holocaust. When this holocaust is mentioned you can almost hear the people exclaim: Who cares!
Idiotic repetition does that for you and idiotic repetition of the lies about Egypt is doing the same thing here too. Six million dead Jews or six million flies swarming over a pile of garbage: "Who cares!" say the good people of the world and move on to more important things.
As to what this does to the United States of America given that the New York Times is an American publication is another matter but you be the judge. As to the metaphor that applies here, it is that of the Likud pimp who is trying to sell a gray lady that could not turn on even a sex starved dog. She used to be pretty that lady; too bad she has turned so ugly and so repulsive.