This paper focuses on the planning of ‘infitah’ (open-door) in the mid-1970s Egypt. Utilizing planning archives, oral histories, state reports, 5-year national plans, and field-research, this paper shows 'how' infitah was planned in relation to emerging geographies of oil in the Middle East and institutionalized and planned through a process of ‘scaling’ Egyptian agrarian life to respond to new demands for labor in the Gulf and new investments by Gulf capital in the Egyptian Nile valley. In the meantime, new geographies of work emerged in which the cheapened work of human subjects and non-human species were appropriated through various policies and development schemes that deemed them uncapitalized and unproductive and thus needed to be properly incorporated in capitalist development. Focusing on specific categories of work (broadly defined as paid and unpaid labor of human subjects and nonhuman species), this chapter shows how the work of tarahil (seasonal migratory) workers, women in the countryside, and livestock were planned and transformed during the 1980s and 1990s in Egypt. Situated in the ‘underdeveloped’ Egyptian south’s sugarcane regions, this paper critically investigates the role of unpaid and cheapened labor by humans and nonhumans in the planning of neoliberal policies. Through historical-geographical research and a critical engagement with social reproduction theory, this chapter offers a historicized reading of the geographies of neo-liberalization. Using oral archives and public records, the first section follows the ideologies and conceptualizations that guided the planners of the Infitah who established careers as planning experts in the Middle East and across the global south during the previous decades. The second section looks at the policies and institutional arrangements that restructured work and land- and the agrarian “reserve army’ - in relation to emerging relations with the fast-urbanizing Gulf. Central to these changes in the new agrarian land reforms in 1991 that aimed to reverse the revolutionary land reforms in the 1950s. My research shows how these reforms were deemed necessary by the Egyptian planners, the World Bank, and the USAID as the only solution for increasing labor demands in the aftermath of the migrations to the Gulf since the mid-1970s. Finally, the third section will delve into three categories of ‘work’ – seasonal migratory workers (tarah’il), women in the countryside, and domestic livestock in family farms. Together, these three examples draw a picture of how work was planned in the early years of the so-called ‘neoliberal’ turn in Egypt