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Having said this, constant improvements in the productivity of land do seem to have
occurred within the all important export agriculture sub-sectors. Increases in output
within the sub-sector of citrus production and within the most important subcategory
of oranges were solely due to intensification and to a certain extent the
concentration of production, rather than the extension of production (see Figure
5.21 and Figure 5.22). However, this may have consisted of more water intensive
production methods 95 . Intensification of existing production is the obverse of what
followed in the south after 1974, where production was of necessity extended and
diversified. This is true both at the level of the sub-sector and at a more general
level.
What the improvements in export production in the north may have meant is still
unclear. Because productivity increases were more in terms of land than labour,
they could point to serious under-utilisation before the 1980's, alternatively they
could suggest a period of rationalisation with the boom years of the i960's seeing
the extension of citrus production into increasingly marginal land. New factor
endowments and costs (shortage of labour and different time horizons in terms of
land fertility) made the cultivation of crops at the margin less cost effective. Price
movements in the 1980s seemed to increase this tendency. Undoubtedly there was a
period of institutional change, the redistribution of tenancies, which may have led to
a change in the rationale of the utilisation of land resources. Clearly the increases in
the productivity of land says something about technical and/or institutional changes
within the sub-sector, following the war of 1974.
95 ibid., p.237.
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