ABSTRACT
Agricultural conditions, systems, and products differ strikingly across the Middle East. Landscapes vary from irrigated plots in the Nile Valley to Mediterranean croplands and fruit orchards in the Levant and from extensive wheat fields in interior Anatolia to desert rangelands of Arabia's wandering herdsmen. Before the oil boom began in the mid-1950s, the Middle East was by every criterion overwhelmingly an agricultural and fishing area. The manufacturing and services sectors were at best only minimally developed. The decline in agricultural employment has been especially marked in the petroleum producing areas, most significantly in the areas around the Gulf. Even in those countries with a relatively high percentage of the economically active population still engaged in agriculture, its percentage of gross domestic product may be notably smaller. By its very nature, agriculture is so highly interactive with ecological factors and cultural traditions that it differs from one area to another as well as within an area.
