ABSTRACT
From as early as 1977 MAF had agreed to sponsor and fund two aspects of Durham University's total research and development programme, in addition to those sponsored by POD. The joint honeybee project, which supported a series of specialists based at al-Khabura and Rustaq in northern Oman and at Salalah in Dhofar, was quite separate from the livestock and irrigation interests. However, the joint spinning and weaving project was an integral part of the Khabura Project in that it sought to make fuller use of livestock by-products and promote mutual self-reliance by adapting a traditional craft industry to the exigencies of a rapidly changing world. However, its governmental linkage with MAF was set to change. In 1982, cabinet decisions designed to rationalise ministerial responsibilities decreed that spinning and weaving lay outside MAF's remit. After prolonged discussion about which Ministry would take on the sponsorship (did it fall within the remit of National Heritage and Culture or of Commerce and Industry?) H.E. Khalfan Nasser al-Wuhaybi, Minister of Social Affairs and Labour, accepted responsibility for the project. Being associated with two ministries gave the Khabura Project more impact nationally. But MoSAL's national, social affairs role meant in practice that its approach to the spinning and weaving project was to protect a dying craft rather than to create a new rural enterprise.
