Drivers and Obstacles of Agriculture Development in Libya

Case study: Marine Aquaculture

Masauda Abdularhim Abuarosha

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Sheffield Hallam University For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy   

Abstact

Agricultural development was a key priority of Libyan government, major resources being allocated  to it during the period 1970-2010. Policies were  put into a series of explicit statements of targets. Fish farming was identified for development, specifically to meet targets for animal protein production. This research clearly shows that agricultural policy and fish farming specifically as failed under all the measures considered. The literature review identified a number of potential causes which were developed into a conceptual framework that has been applied to the case study of fish farming 

Fish farming has been chosen as a case study to investigate the causes of agricultural policies failure, as it allows the natural challenges facing agricultural development such as  climate and topography to be isolated because of their insignificance for fish farming and the focus to be directed to the political and  economic issues

The research clearly shows that agricultural development was hindered by a number of political and economical issues.   The issues identified were; availability of oil revenue and the corruption associated with the ruling elite  has had a negative role in agricultural development process, in terms of high dependency of on oil, and government ignoring of improving productivity  led to emergence of the Dutch disease  symptoms in agriculture sector; the continued  domination of public sector, that was characterised  by poor economic  performance, has had a negative impact on development process in terms of mismanagement and spread of corruption. Political ideologies, in particular the aim of realizing self sufficiency, was a political propaganda which served the  personal targets of ruling elite, rather than a sound basis for economic development

The key contribution to the knowledge was the understanding of how the issues identified in the conceptual framework integrated together to create the political and economical environment where agricultural policies will fail.  What researcher has done analyse how  these different factors have interacted to cause the failure of policies. From this understanding of process key lessons can be learnt by other countries facing the potential dangers of mineral wealth interacting with political systems that create the opportunity for wide scale corruption and inability for critical review of government policies