This is all part of a plan -- they revised the constitution last year to require that any independent candidate for president must be backed by at least 140 local councilors (10 from each province) -- so now the claim will be that the Brotherhood (or any other party) can't back a candidate, only the NDP can because only the NDP has the councilors to do so.  There are similar requirements for the People's Assembly and the borderline useless Shura Council, which are the upper and lower houses of parliament -- the Brotherhood has enough deputies in the lower house, but they were all but shut out of the Shura Council elections by blatant rigging.

So voila, in the next presidential election (when, one assumes, the NDP candidate will be Gamal Mubarak, the current president's son) nobody will be able to meet the constitutional requirements and field a candidate, but it will all be perfectly "legal."

But the food riots in Mahalla (and my understanding is that it really seems to have been food riots by unemployed youth, not labor riots by striking workers) are really not about the Brotherhood.  The MB is not affiliated with the striking workers of Mahalla -- they are more closely associated with the leftists, although not entirely so, and some of them are actually members of the NDP as well.  But the Mahalla thing is emphatically not a Brotherhood-related matter.

Re: rice in southern Africa... There's the Okavango Delta, which is almost entirely a protected wilderness and wildlife area, with some mining concessions.  Both mining and tourism are more lucrative for Botswana (which is one of the most water-impoverished countries on earth) than agriculture likely ever will be, and then there's the whole issue of what to do with the elephants, zebras, rhinos, wild dogs, lions, cheetahs, etc....  Hard to really do crop cultivation around so many predators and rompy-stompy herds of elephants.