Oil in Libya: Some Implications

Abstract

RO NE of the most remarkable of the numerous changes which have occurred in Africa during the last decade has been the emergence of a new oil province in the northern Sahara, an area which wvas formerly unexplored for oil. In Algeria and Libya extensive discoveries have been made and high hopes are also held for oil successes in the Spanish Sahara, Tunisia, and 1\Jauritania.1 The importance of oil to the economies of all of these countries is specially vital, because their territories are mainly arid or semi-arid and pose thorny problems of agricultural development. Furthermore, substantial resources of other fuels have been absent. 1\iost of these territories have long endured social and economic backwardness, and oil is looked upon by their inhabitants as the salvation. Nowhere is this more true than in the United Kingdom of an immense area of nearly 680,000 square miles comprising three provinces: Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and the Fezzan. Libya contains no more than 114 million people, clustered mainly in the semiarid and Mediterranean fringes of northern Tripolitania and northern Cyrenaica. When it became independent on Christmas eve, 1951, Libya was considered by many to be one of the poorest 1 J. J. Clarke: Econoomic and Political Changes in the Sahara, Geo-raphy, Vol. 46, 1961, pp. 102-119. countries in the world. Its population was largely illiterate and dependent upon Allah's annual benefaction of rainfall. Production was small and exports were negligible. Three decades of Italian rule had provided modern roads, ports, and European towns as well as considerable areas of rural colonization, but it had not greatly benefited the Libyan population. The dichotomy of European and native religions, economies, and modes of life had been too marked. And, although there were less than half of the Italian population left in Libya during the British and French military administrations until 1951, no great social and economic changes occurred before independence. During the first decade of independence, Libya became virtually a developm-nent laboratory for the under-developed lands and received scores of foreign experts, notably for the United Nations M/lission resident in Libya and the United States Operations Mission. Every aspect of the economy, and to a lesser extent of the society, has come under critical appraisal and numerous reports, general and particular,2 have momentarily fluttered the dovecots of Tripoli 2 See R. NVT. Hill: A Bibliography of Libya, Department of Geography, Durham Colleges in the University of Durham, Research Paper Series No. 1 (1959); and M. Murabet: A Bibliography of Libya, Malta, 1959. The principal United Nations Reports are B. Higgins: The Economic and Social Development of 1953; 0. J. Wsheatley: {Report on the Agriculture of Libya, FAO, 1951.