ABSTRACT
Second World War was on a small scale, but rapid development of the oil industry took place in the region after 1945.
The region of North Africa and Southwest Asia is about 12,590,000 sq km (4,861,000 sq miles) in area, 9.4 per cent of the world’s land area. Its population of 353 million in 1993 was 6.4 per cent of the world’s total. Population has been growing very quickly in the last few decades, doubling from 80 million in the early 1930s to 160 million in the early 1960s and doubling again by the late 1980s. The total is expected to reach a staggering 750 million by about 2025 if present trends continue. The area under cultivation has not increased substantially since the 1920s and is unlikely to grow much between 1990 and 2025. Of the total area of North Africa and Southwest Asia, only 7.4 per cent (940,000 sq km-363,000 sq miles) is cultivated, 5.1 per cent is forested (645,000 sq km-249,000 sq miles) and 21.2 per cent (2,665,000 sq km-1,030,000 sq miles) is classified, much of it generously, as natural
pasture. Thus two-thirds of the total area has no bioclimatic use. According to my assessment of natural resources, for their 6.4 per cent share of the
world’s population, North Africa and Southwest Asia have 4.8 per cent of the world’s bioclimatic resources and 5.0 per cent of the world’s non-fuel minerals, but a mere 1.5 per cent of the freshwater resources, compared with 35 per cent of the fossil fuel reserves, mostly in the form of oil and natural gas. The region therefore has a favourable natural resource to population balance (world 100: region 213) but an irregular resource profile. The distribution of oil and natural gas reserves is very uneven in relation to area (see Table 13.2) and to population. Most of the oil production is exported, a prospect also for natural gas, as the international movement of liquefied natural gas by sea increases.
