FOR the first time in Egyptian history, agriculture is no longer the country’s biggest employer, new census figures revealed on Monday. Its position has been usurped by the private sector which now employs more than double the number of people it did 10 years ago after a vast wave of privatisations launched by the government in 1991. Farming employs just 29,8% of the workforce in 1996-7 against 47,5% 10 years earlier, the census results showed. The private sector, including the large informal sector, employs 37,6% of the workforce against 18,7% a decade previously. The number of civil servants has risen over the same period — 27,15% of the workforce works for the government in 1996-7 compared to 22,7% in 1986-7. But the large workforce once employed by companies fully or partly owned by the state almost halved over the same period, falling from 10,7% to just 5,42%.