"When the law took effect, I resisted to the end. I said I would shoot, but of course when it came to it, I didn't," says Mohammed Lashine, a Delta farmer from the village of Saadwa who three years ago lost his tenancy of 4 feddans (about 4 acres) on which he once supported a family of 16.

Other tenant farmers proved less pliant. Since rent controls and security of tenure for tenant farmers were removed in 1997, skirmishes have led to 87 deaths, 545 injuries and 798 arrests, according to figures compiled by the Land Centre for Human Rights (LCHR).

The non-governmental organisation blames the violence as much on the brutality of the police - called in by landlords asserting their rights under the new law - as the tenants' resistance.

Despite advance warning - the new law was passed in 1992 but was only implemented five years later - the reversion to pre-Nasserite agrarian capitalism has been abrupt.

One of President Nasser's first acts in 1952, designed to break the back of the landed class and gain the support of a grateful peasantry, was to set rents at about EŁ600 per feddan and to give tenants an almost complete guarantee that they could pass leases on to their children in perpetuity.

All this changed three years ago. Rents tripled on average and tenants became dismissable at a year's notice.

"Landlords can now charge as much as they want for as long as they want," says one of the new law's beneficiaries, Ahmed Gameldin El-Doar, a Cairo businessman whose family owns the entire 130-feddan holding of the hamlet of Doar.

Landlords believe that they have regained their rights. Mazen Hammad, the landlord who discontinued Mr Lashine's tenancy complains: "Thirty years of Nasserite laws brainwashed tenant farmers into thinking they were the owners".

It is hardly surprising that President Hosni Mubarak found it easy to pass the new law through the People's Assembly, in which landlords are well represented.

Ray Bush, a Leeds university academic working at the American University in Cairo, accepts that some reform was necessary, though he argues that the government should have focused on changing regulation of the agricultural market rather than on the balance between land owners and users.

"But it is highly questionable that it should have been designed to benefit the rich and hit the rural poor," he says. He also blames the World Bank and other foreign aid donors for encouraging the tenancy changes and for being blind to their pernicious social and economic effects.

According to the LCHR, of Egypt's estimated 905,000 tenant farmers, slightly more than half are still farming, either because they agreed to pay the higher rents or because they owned other land they could fall back on. Some 420,000 have become landless, while just 12,000 have received alternative land from the government in compensation.

LCHR has provided legal aid in about 1,000 court cases to dispossessed tenants seeking their rights under the new law to compensation for investment in assets such as barns or machinery or to alternative land.

Despite its desert reclamation projects, the government has insufficient new land to offer, says Abdelmoula Ismail of the LCHR. "It would take 1m feddans to put the dispossessed back in business."

There are some signs that the violence is lessening, now that rents have stabilised and, in a few recent cases, even been lowered. But rural litigiousness over boundaries and irrigation water is on the increase, says Mr Ismail, "because the changes have brought new people to the land who do not know the local customs and delineations".

eanwhile, the tenant farmer class is struggling to adapt. Some are biting the bullet, selling off possessions to pay the higher rent in the hope that fortune will somehow smile on them in the future. Others have been reluctant to take the risk.

ohammed Abdul Yazeid, a 45-year-old with family of five, did not dare commit himself to the higher rent demanded for his two leased feddans. "If I couldn't pay, I would have been taken to the police and I would be disgraced," he says. He now works as a piecework electrician for a building company.

In Saadwa, Hamad Abu Zahran, a 26-year-old who gave up his two-feddan tenancy, was lucky enough to own an irrigation pump, which he can rent out for EŁ3 an hour. This far outweighs the EŁ5 a day he can earn as a day labourer.

The impact on ex-tenant farmers' wives has been unsettling. "In the past, we didn't work for other men," says one woman in Doar. "Now we do, and we have to stick to the working hours fixed on us, from dawn to dusk." This gives women less time to hunt for bargains in food, which appears to be in shorter supply as those who still have tenancies often switch to cash crops such as soyabeans and sunflowers, which are more useful for paying the rent than for feeding the family.

To listen to many tenants' complaints, you would think the countryside was on the verge of mass insurrection. The dispossessed Mr Lashine of Saadwa is ready to denounce his ex-landlord, Mr Hammad, as "eating off 60 feddans while the rest of us starve". He is also ready to blame the government - but not President Mubarak.

And some landlords certainly appear to have mishandled their new rights. To prevent their tenants getting ideas about customary rights to a particular plot, they have insisted every tenant take on a different piece of land. Most tenants have accepted, but some interpreted this as kicking them off the land outright.

In some villages, harmony still reigns. Mr El-Doar seems so at home with his tenants and ex-tenants in Doar that he has just built himself a house there - the only one in the hamlet painted and tiled.

Asked whether he is re-investing any of his extra rental income (which, admittedly, he has to share with a dozen other family members) into farming, he replies: "Nothing."

His tenants, sitting around him, don't bat an eyelid. After a pause, he adds "I shouldn't say this, but I have given the government half a feddan to built a school on." His tenants nod approvingly.


The sun still shines on the industry
Draining away resources
The Nile emerges as a rich source