Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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leaps toward modernity. And instead of isolationism, the Saudi government has opted for
accelerated development affecting all aspects of the society. By 1990,77.3 percent of the
Saudi population lived in cities designated "urban," that is settlements inhabited by 5,000
and more. 45 Change has also been reflected in the steady growth of the middle class
paralleling the government's massive allocation in education, infrastructural development,
and industrialization which have had the impact of promoting the private sector and
recruiting considerable employment in the public sector. The freeing of the populace from
low-earning agricultural and handicraft occupations has created a labor force dependent on
the state. This dependency on government employment has supplanted allegiance to the old
ruling classes of the settled village-states and tribal association. Nevertheless, acute exodus
to urban centers at the cost of abandoning poverty-ridden rural areas, characteristic of
modern urbanization, has been tempered by the state's agricultural incentives.
C. Agricultural Development and Policy
Saudi Arabia's topography is essentially an expanse of desert; out of the country's
one million square miles, only 1.3 percent of the land is suitable for settled agriculture.
The agricultural population sparsely inhabits the desert oases and the southwestern
mountainous slopes. Agriculture in Saudi Arabia was historically carried out by the settled
agriculturalists and by semi-nomadic bedouins who in the better rain-watered areas
practiced cereal cultivation as a supplement to animal husbandry. The transformation of the
Saudi Arabian society from its pre-industrial, agrarian and pastoral ways of life to an
urbanized, developing society has come at the expense of its traditional economy. Since
the 1940s, oil has gradually replaced agriculture as the mainstay of towns' subsistence
economy. Also, the oil industry and state jobs encouraged nomadic bedouins, who have
traditionally provided the needs of towns' population for meat and dairy products, to
abandon their pastoral life.
Traditionally, industrialization requires the moving of national resources out of
agriculture to manufacturing, a substitution of capital for labor, and the freeing of labor to
move from agriculture to industry, all results in outmigration from farms. This is because
industrialization entails the adoption of advance of technology in agricultural production.
The confluence of urbanization, foreign migration, and rising living standards, rendered
local agriculture, still primitive and reliant on inefficient methods geared to a subsistence
economy, unable to meet the increasing demand for food. The oil affluence, though