The Seasonal Employment Profile in Egyptian Agriculture

Abstract

The present paper contains a revision and extension of an estimate of labour requirements in Egyptian Agriculture earlier carried out and published by the Ministry of Agriculture, Cairo. The estimate of the Ministry of Agriculture suffers from various defects which will be made clear in the sequel. Some of these defects could, however, be remedied and although even the revised and extended estimates are open to various kinds of criticism, they do nevertheless offer some information on the employment situation in agriculture. Another statistical material illuminating this problem will soon be available from the ILO INP-sample survey of village-employment at present under work. This latter sample survey will probably supply us with a much more detailed, reliable and complete information of village-employment than has INP-sample hitherto been available in this country. Since, however, the ILO does not permit inflation to a national level, while on the other hand the Ministry of Agriculture estimate is in principle on a national basis, the estimate presented in this paper may be considered complementary to the forth- coming ILO INP study. For these various reasons we found it justified to present our revision of the Ministry of Agriculture estimate, in spite of all its short-comings.