Word: nasser
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Egypt's economy was already strained when Sadat succeeded Gamal Abdel Nasser as President in 1970. Since then it has got worse. One of the problems is geographic: though vast in area, Egypt is mostly desert. Fully 96% of its population is jammed into a narrow green belt averaging seven miles in width and 500 miles long in the Nile Valley. Another problem is the population itself, which is growing at a million per year despite belated efforts to control...
...Cities. All of this adds up to a desperate need for peace on Egypt's part so that the country can address its overwhelming problems. Impressed by Sadat's openness to investment from abroad, foreign investors who were put off by Nasser's restrictive Arab socialism are reportedly willing to spend as much as $3 billion on Egyptian development projects. But these are long-term investments, and for the time being the country is earmarking 25% of its G.N.P. each year for military preparedness...
Fall Guy. Still, Sadat's principal power base is not the army but Egypt's affluent landowners and its urban upper-middle class; though those groups total fewer than 2 million people, or one-twentieth of the population, they dominate the country. When Sadat was Vice President, Nasser mocked him as "old Goha," after a legendary fall guy in Egyptian folk humor. He insisted that "Sadat's greatest ambition is to own a big automobile and have the government pay for the gasoline." But on his own, old Goha turned out to be perhaps a shrewder politician...
...Sadat is as comfortable with local mayors as he is with sophisticated city dwellers. In fact, Sadat functions as if Egypt were one big Mit Abu el Kom and he the great 'umda. Sadat has pretty much neutralized the once-mighty Arab Socialist Union, which Nasser established as Egypt's only political party. He uses the A.S.U. only as a sounding board of grass roots opinion; membership is no longer mandatory for representatives sitting in the People's Assembly, Egypt's parliament, and Sadat has allowed small, informal party groupings to develop. Although the assembly debates...
...defenders. They claim that Egypt eventually will not have to import any fertilizer; plants powered by electricity generated at Aswan* will turn out enough to make the country self-sufficient. The loss of the sardine industry, they say, is more than counterbalanced by the new fishing industry on Lake Nasser, which covers 2,000 square miles behind the dam. Fishermen are now taking river bass, Nile catfish and carp from the lake, and government experts estimate that annual catches will eventually rise to as high as 60,000 tons. Coastal erosion, Aswan defenders say, is not so much a product...