Wrath of the Rural Poor

BEIRUT -- One of the important common features of many of the current uprisings against Arab governments by their own people has been the fact that poor and rural populations have often led the challenge to existing power structures that are dominated by wealthy urban elites. Poverty in itself usually is not a sufficient reason for populations to revolt and seek to overthrow existing regimes. But when poverty combines with a brand of abuse of power and accumulation of wealth by urban rulers that leads to large swaths of the rural and provincial populations being pauperized, marginalized and effectively disenfranchised, a volatile situation develops and ultimately explodes if it is not redressed.

It is worth remembering that Mohammad Bouazizi, the unemployed Tunisian in a provincial town who set himself on fire and sparked the revolt that overthrew the Tunisian regime of former President Zein el Abidin Ben Ali, was trying to earn money by selling fruits and vegetables to feed his mother and siblings. He did not set himself on fire to protest being poor. He did what most poor people do, which is try to work himself out of poverty and seek to live a middle class life, with dignity and decency.

The Tunisian system did not allow him to do this. A local police office overturned his cart and prevented him from trying to work his way out of poverty, and when he went to the local provincial governor's office to complain of his mistreatment he was not given a hearing and turned away.

Only then did he burn and ultimately kill himself to protest the twin, cumulative indignities that he had been subjected to at the hands of two different public officers in his small town. He could handle being poor. He could not handle being denied the chance to work himself out of poverty. He refused to acquiesce in his perpetual pauperization, marginalization and humiliation.

His death sparked rallies by hundreds of thousands of other Tunisians, and then millions of other Arabs in different countries, because they shared his sense of degradation and dehumanization, and, like him, they refused to accept this fate at the hands of their own compatriots who ruled insensitively from the wealthy capital.

It is significant that many of the current revolts, especially in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, started in relatively poor rural or peri-urban areas where they gained steam and then headed into the symbolic public squares in the middle of the capital. Rural poverty -- and its urban cousin that is often a consequence of rural-to-urban migration -- has become more serious and entrenched in recent years in many parts of the Arab world.

This is part of a global trend in many respects, as outlined in the recently released World Rural Poverty Report published by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Of the 1.4 billion people in the world living in extreme poverty of less than $1.25 per day, 70 percent, or some one billion, live in rural areas. The poor are not a static category, though. People move in and out of poverty, depending on a variety of factors that are often beyond their control (weather, government policies, corporate and trade patterns).

The Arab world for decades has suffered the distinct problem of being the only region in the world that is collectively non-democratic -- which has prevented the poor from asserting their rights or actively organizing and working to improve their condition.

In Egypt, for example, one out of every four persons in rural areas is poor, while in the cities it is one of out ten. In Tunisia, the rural poverty rate is five times as high as the urban rate; in Egypt and Morocco, rural poverty is three times higher than the urban rate. On average, 40% of the Arab world's population is rural, and for decades has been declining relative to the urban population. Yet the combination of feeling stuck in poverty and being unable to do anything about this in the face of the power monopolies in the big cities is one of the factors that has clearly motivated millions of poor, marginalized and often rural Arabs to revolt in recent months.