Drivers and obstacles of agriculture development in Libya : Case study : Marine aquaculture.

Agricultural development was a key priority of Libyan government, major resources being allocated to it during the period 1970-2010. Policies were put into a series of explicit statements of targets. Fish farming was identified for development, specifically to meet targets for animal protein production. This research clearly shows that agricultural policy and fish farming specifically as failed under all the measures considered. The literature review identified a number of potential causes which were developed into a conceptual framework that has been applied to the case study of fish farming. Fish farming has been chosen as a case study to investigate the causes of agricultural policies failure, as it allows the natural challenges facing agricultural development such as climate and topography to be isolated because of their insignificance for fish farming and the focus to be directed to the political and economic issues. The research clearly shows that agricultural development was hindered by a number of political and economic issues. The issues identified were; availability of oil revenue and the corruption associated with the ruling elite has had a negative role in agricultural development process, in terms of high dependency of on oil, and government ignoring of improving productivity led to emergence of the Dutch disease symptoms in agriculture sector; the continued domination of public sector, that was characterised by poor economic performance, has had a negative impact on development process in terms of mismanagement and spread of corruption. Political ideologies, in particular the aim of realizing self-sufficiency, were a political propaganda which served the personal targets of ruling elite, rather than a sound basis for economic development. The key contribution to the knowledge was the understanding of how the issues identified in the conceptual framework integrated together to create the political and economic environment where agricultural policies will fail. What researcher has done analyse how these different factors have interacted to cause the failure of policies. From this understanding of process key lessons can be learnt by other countries facing the potential dangers of mineral wealth interacting with political systems that create the opportunity for wide scale corruption and inability for critical review of government policies.