Rice, representation, and resistance: ecological agency of farmers in Egypt’s Nile Delta

Egypt’s Nile Delta faces a profound agrarian crisis driven by water scarcity, upstream damming, and sea level rise. This article analyzes how smallholder rice farmers navigate these intersecting pressures through ecological awareness, adaptive agency, and everyday action. Drawing on historical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kafr El-Sheikh governorate, the study reveals the sophisticated ecological knowledge held by Delta farmers and documents their systematic exclusion from official water governance and agricultural policymaking. Despite this marginalization, farmers reassert agency through multiple forms of resistance. Through these practices, they redefine themselves not as passive victims of ecological crisis but as active and knowledgeable custodians of their land and water. The study argues for participatory governance models that recognize and incorporate farmers’ ecological knowledge, particularly in contexts where environmental and political crises overlap and reinforce one another.