Managing Agricultural Resources in Libya: Recent Experience

Abstract

Since the revolution of September 1969 very bold and expensive experiments have been mounted to test the productivity of Libya's soil and water resources. Ten years on it is appropriate to review these experiments in terms of the extension of the irrigated and cultivated area as well as with respect to the impact of such innovations on the renewable natural resources base and the viability of agricultural production in existing or changed economic circumstances.Libyan economic development takes place in the special circumstances of an oil economy in which the massive oil revenues accruing to the government are deployed almost exclusively through the public sector via ministries and secretariats. In an oil economy a special and inescapable burden of responsibility falls to the government to lead and direct economic and social change (Penrose 1973, p7) and this role has at no time been avoided by the revolutionary government. On the contrary there has been a progressive rationalisation of activity and property since 1969 so that by 1979 almost all commercial and industrial activity, as well as housing and services were controlled by government agencies.The agricultural sector has been affected by this trend towards public intervention directly through the capital invested in cultivation, irrigation and livestock and indirectly through the control of the marketing of agricultural products. The final phase of this interaction is seen in the new proposal to reorganize the farming of the coastal strip of the Jefara Plain and the coastal area as far as east Misuratah, with a view to creating viable agricultural units able to support a Libyan family with no outside labour. The economic, social and ideological implications of this proposal are immense not to speak of the opportunity which such a reorganization would present for the rational management of the crucial and much impaired groundwater resource upon which irrigated farming depends in the favoured and therefore ‘over-developed’ coastal strip.