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Food security policy has little room to manoeuvre in Egypt, where the per-person endowment of cropland is one of the smallest in the world. Virtually all 82 million Egyptians, along with almost all agricultural lands, are squeezed into just five per cent of the nation's total land area: A strip running eight to 15 kilometres wide along the Nile River and fanning out through the Delta. It's as if the entire population of the United States and all of our agriculture were clustered within 60 kilometres of the Mississippi.

There have long been laws against building on agricultural land in Egypt, but enforcement has always been lax. During the past year, with the government otherwise occupied, there was virtually no enforcement at all. Powerful economic interests have jumped into that vacuum, and land-grabbing and construction on cropland have accelerated. Economically stressed farmers have a hard time resisting offers of big money from aggressive developers.

it will not be easy to restructure a system that for decades fit comfortably into a thoroughly corrupt economy. For one thing, it will be necessary to deal with resistance from the food industries, interest groups, tycoons, and politicians who benefit from the current way of doing things.

the leaders of Tahrir want to institutionalise the incredible creativity of the revolution, from musical performances and film to artwork, poetry and story-telling. These activities have sustained protesters during the darkest days of violence and have helped to attract hundreds of thousands of "ordinary Egyptians" to the Meidan during each of the occupations since January. This would constitute a permanent counterpoint to the state media and other mechanisms that the government and elite have at their disposal, through which they try to convince Egyptians that the Tahriris are little more than "thugs" who don't have their interests at heart.

one of the major problems of Tahrir today (similar to the situation during the last major occupation, in July, and different from the January-February protests), is that it has clearly been infiltrated by the security services with provocateurs. Their job is to keep the Meidan constantly on edge, and in so doing, keep the pressure on, drive people away, and encourage the degradation of life in Tahrir to the point that it either dissolves on its own, or an be "cleaned out", Zuccotti Park-style.

"People have to learn for themselves," one explained to me this morning. "And they will. In the meantime, we will produce another proposal and figure out how more forcefully to deal with the infiltrators. I know who they are, after ten months of doing this, I can smell them." I have no doubt he can, but the real question is whether Egyptians more broadly can not merely smell, but root out, the precise infiltration of their embryonic democracy by the forces of crony capitalism and corruption that have for so long dominated the country. "Power is attractive and parliament comes with a lot of money," one long-time activist put it to me in justifying the anger at the betrayal of the principles and of the revolution's martyrs by the emerging political elite.

It's the same old problem for us in the West. We mouth the word "democracy" and we are all for fair elections – providing the Arabs vote for whom we want them to vote for.

For years, this wretched man had been talking about a "slow liberalising" of his country. But all dictators know they are in greatest danger when they start freeing their entrapped countrymen from their chains.

The torture chambers will keep going. We will maintain our good relations with the dictators. We will continue to arm their armies and tell them to seek peace with Israel. And they will do what we want. Ben Ali has fled. The search is now on for a more pliable dictator in Tunisia – a "benevolent strongman" as the news agencies like to call these ghastly men. And the shooting will go on – as it did yesterday in Tunisia – until "stability" has been restored. No, on balance, I don't think the age of the Arab dictators is over. We will see to that.