ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the economic and social transformations that have underlain such staggering achievements, and provides particular attention on the changing urban-rural relations which have both engendered agricultural change. It also explores the changing patterns of food flows in the Arabian peninsula. The chapter focuses on the factors behind these changes, and begins with a broad summary of the demographic situation and the balance between the urban and rural economies. A balance between water supply and demand had been reached by the settled population and, it is changes in this balance that have been the most significant result of the oil industrialisation and urbanisation in the region to which attention now turns. The chapter highlights the very low populations of all of the countries of the Arabian peninsula apart from Saudi Arabia and the Yemen Arab Republic at the beginning of the 1970s. It provides a very approximate indication of changes in the agrarian economy over 1970s.