THE MYTH OF SOCIAL COST.pdf - Institute of Economic Affairs

EPILOGUE
tribal ownership would be countered and reversed. If individual
tribesmen had property rights in land, i.e. if they could
legally exclude non-owners, there would be an incentive to invest
in planting grass, shrubs and trees. The incentives would
exist to roll back, rather than to create, desertification.
The lesson of Libya
That a 'private property solution' holds the key to the containment
of the desert is revealed by the lessons of Libyan agricultural
history over the centuries.
Over 90 per cent of the Republic of Libya is arid desert or
semi-arid steppe. But this was not always so.
'Historians claim that in Roman times Tripolitania [the western
part of present-day Libya] was well-wooded and that grazing
between the trees was productive.' 1
Another study concludes that
'under the [Roman] empire the farmlands of Tripolitania reached
a level of prosperity equalled neither before nor since.' 2
Cultivated farmland was far more extensive during the Roman
era than before or after, and huge areas that have become
desert were then green and plenteous. Tripolitania and
Cyrenaica (the eastern Roman province) may not have been
the granaries ofthe Roman empire, but the desert was then held
far more extensively in check than under the following eras of
Vandal, Berber and Arab rule.
Historical research suggests that there was no wide variation
in climatic conditions to account for the rolling back of the
desert in the Roman era and the long-term trend to desertification
thereafter. The answer seems to lie in the errors of
human beings, not in the accidents of nature. Systems of
common land ownership now account for the bulk of Libyan
acreage, and have done so for over fifteen hundred years, since
the Vandals expelled the Romans from Libya, circa AD 455. But
under Roman rule the land was extensively farmed under a
system of private property rights. During the early empire it
was farmed primarily by Berber peasants and other smallholders
such as retired soldiers who had been granted private
property rights in plots of land. Later there also emerged
1 A. Bottomley, 'The Effect of Common Ownership of Land upon Resource
Allocation in Tripolitania', Land Economics, 1963, fn. 17, p. 94.
' J. Wright, Libya, Ernest Benn, London, 1969, p. 54.
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