Changing Rural Systems In Oman

The Khabura Project

Roderic W Dutton, Dutton, Roderic W. Dutton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136174988
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 1999. Oman in the decades prior to the 1960s was largely isolated from the rest of the world and its changing economies and societies. With a limited education, little international links, small health systems and government under the then Sultan Said bin Taimur. Rural communities in northern Oman had very little contact with the Sultan's government, which was based in the southern province of Dhofar. In a world in which people in most countries, including the Gulf States, gained at least some benefit from modem education and health services, Omani villagers and pastoralists had recourse only to Koranic schools and traditional healers. On the other hand, however, they retained full responsibility for the management of their rural resources on which they depended for their livelihoods and for life itself and had evolved effective communal systems for their development and conservation. These were exemplified by regulations governing the protection of trees and by the work of the committees which controlled the traditional falaj water supply network. People worked interdependently, responding to the contributions made by other members of the rural communities in a system of mutual self-reliance. They also lived ~n harmony with their environment in a manner which time had proven to be truly sustainable. This volume looks at the changes that occurred after Sultan Qaboos came to power in 1970.

Introduction

Changing Rural Systems in Oman

The Khabura Project

1. Introduction

Oman in the decades prior to the 1960s was largely isolated from the rest of the world and its changing economies and societies. It was very difficult for foreigners to get into the country and almost equally difficult for Omanis to return if they had departed to find work elsewhere. There was no modem education system, other than three small junior schools in Muscat. There was no health service, other than an American mission hospital, and there were no paved roads, other than a strip a few kilometres in length linking Muscat with Mutrah. International links were minimal, and the government was a small and very personal affair in the hands of the then Sultan, Said bin Taimur (Allen, 1987; Clements, 1980).

Rural communities in northern Oman had very little contact with the Sultan’s government, which was based in the southern province of Dhofar. In a world in which people in most countries, including the Gulf States, gained at least some benefit from modem education and health services, Omani villagers and pastoralists had recourse only to Koranic schools and traditional healers. On the other hand, however, they retained full responsibility for the management of their rural resources on which they depended for their livelihoods and for life itself, and had evolved effective communal systems for their development and conservation. These were exemplified by regulations governing the protection of trees and by the work of the committees which controlled the traditional falaj water supply network. People worked interdependently, responding to the contributions made by other members of the rural communities in a system of mutual self-reliance. They also lived in harmony with their environment in a manner which time had proven to be truly sustainable.

However, change was occurring. In the 1960s it had three main sources. First, disaffection between the Sultan and the mountain people of Dhofar led to insurrection in the mid-1960s supported from socialist South Yemen after Aden achieved its independence from Britain in 1967. This drew increased British and world attention to Oman including pressure for change that led to the replacement of Said bin Taimur by his son, the modernising Sultan Qaboos bin Said, in 1970. The second source of change was the oil enriched level of economic activity in the Gulf States which created many openings for men in rural Oman who migrated from their villages to find waged labour in Bahrain (from as early as the 1930s), Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The material, health, educational and other aspirations of these men were deeply affected. At the same time the economic life and the organisational structures of their villages and pastoral communities were increasingly altered by their absence. The third, and most profound, source of change was the export of oil from Oman, starting in 1967. Oil income immediately became a very high proportion of national income, so its effects rapidly penetrated into every aspect of Omani rural life (Dutton, 1987a), including those which characterised even the most remote rural areas.

After Sultan Qaboos came to power in 1970, change was extremely rapid. He opened the country to external influences of all types. Within a few years, networks of schools, hospitals and roads had been built, and a conventional governmental structure had emerged, based in Muscat and the greater capital area (Skeet, 1992). Many new employment opportunities were created within the civil service and the armed forces, and attracted men into jobs away from the rural areas, though typically they continued to regard the village as their family home. These changes radically improved family incomes and standards of health and education, and the rural population grew rapidly as did its demand for water and land. People were much less dependent than previously, for life and livelihood, on the proper management of rural resources.

At the same time the new government was very keen to encourage economic growth in the rural areas. As a first step it needed to learn more about the resource base and the economic potential of the different regions. Therefore it invited a number of consulting firms to survey the country as a whole and its principal sub-divisions. In addition, the University of Durham was asked to adopt a different and complementary approach to information gathering in rural areas (Bowen-Jones, 1971). In work financially supported by Shell it undertook a series of long-term research surveys (1993-6) in a cross-section of northern Oman from the village of al-Khabura in the centre of the Batina coast to Ibri in the Dhahira (Figure 1). The research topics included a wide range of human and natural resource issues. Research was staggered but each research activity typically extended over one to two years so there was sufficient time to gain a depth of understanding about the natural resources and the people, and the nature and rate of the impacts on them being brought about by the three sources of change identified above. The findings and conclusions of the research are detailed in chapter two of this volume, particularly where they relate to the village communities in the vicinity of al-Khabura. The University was then asked to undertake a rural development project, centred at al-Khabura (Figure 2), based on the findings and conclusions of the research (Bowen-Jones, 1974a-b). The design, implementation and outcome of what became generally known at the ‘Khabura Project’ are covered in chapters three and four.

Figure 1.  The Research Survey Field Study Area, Al-Khabura to Ibri

Source: Dutton, 1982b

Figure 2.  Al-Khabura: Coastal Villages and Cultivated Land, Mid-1970s

In a long drawn out decision-making process initiated by the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in 1986 the Khabura Project changed, in 1989, from being focused around a broad-based set of farm systems and rural development activities with a sub-regional impact to having a narrower range of activities with a national scope, as discussed in chapter five. In the process it also moved from al-Khabura to new work centres in al-Kuwair (near the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, MAF), Wadi Quriyat in northern interior Oman and Rumais on the Batina coast.

The Khabura Project aimed to achieve rural community development, or indeed ‘re-development’ following the dislocation and disintegration of traditional rural systems which had resulted from the shock of the extraordinarily rapid, regional and Omani, oil-induced changes experienced in the 1960s and 1970s.

A lot was learned by the Project and real achievements were made though the overall programme fell short of its higher aims and objectives. Throughout this volume aspects of the Project’s strengths and weaknesses, and successes and failures, are discussed in the hope that these evaluations will have generic relevance to similar work elsewhere. The final chapter, Prospect and Retrospect, examines the role that could be played by an entity, here called a Rural Development Centre (RDC), set up to help maximise the likelihood of achieving and sustaining beneficial change in rural areas. Finally, the Khabura Project’s progress is analysed in terms of the proposed RDC structure.

The overall Khabura Project, including the research phase and the later work at Wadi Quriyat, Rumais and al-Kuwair, is most unusual in terms of its timespan (1973-94), breadth and continuity. These are certainly important reasons for any deeper insights into the working of rural systems in Oman and, more broadly, rural development processes, that the Project may have revealed. It also made the Project’s staff very aware that it was working within a national political, economic and social context that was constantly changing and therefore impacting on the Project’s work in different ways. The fundamental change was the rapid growth of the population and the ever increasing demand by the people for water, land, education, health, vehicles, housing and other material goods and services. Education, we saw, led to profound changes in aspirations, away from an interest in rural life, and to a reduction in environmental awareness. Also, although in the 1970s it seemed that everyone could find salaried employment in Muscat or the Gulf, by the late 1980s such opportunities were rarer. Young men, therefore, were reconsidering the option of staying in the village, and some were prepared to give more serious consideration to farming as a primary means of obtaining a livelihood. Other indicative examples of changes to which the Project had to respond include the facts that when the Project started there was no electricity in al-Khabura and no garage workshops, but long before it closed, the village was on the national electricity grid and workshops abounded.

At the national level the Project’s lifespan coincided with the tenure of no fewer than three Ministers of Agriculture and Fisheries, and countless changes of other senior officials and expatriate advisers. The Ministers had strong, but contrasting, interests in the Project’s work. Other officials were helpful, obstructive or passive according to circumstance and personal inclination. With some, discussion and exchanges of views were positive, with others negative. Governmental priorities, policies and regulations were also always under review, and affected the Project’s work directly or indirectly. Thus an approach or an activity that might have been ‘right’ at the start of the Project would certainly have been less right five years on, and possibly quite inappropriate by the end. The Project’s long life, therefore, made it very aware that specific objectives, approaches and techniques had always to be subject to review through constant interaction with the farmers and rural producers, on the one hand, and the national governmental machinery on the other hand.

2. Rural Communities under Change: Development or Disintegration?

The picture drawn here of rural communities has been created from the results of the series of studies, mentioned above, undertaken by a team from the University of Durham in the early and mid-1970s of a cross-section of northern Oman. The study area extended from the village of al-Khabura in the central part of the Batina coast, across the Batina coastal plain, up the wadi al-Hawasina to the pass over the Hajar mountains, and down the wadi al-Kabir to the villages of the Dhahira and the desert edge beyond them (Figure 1). The studies were made at a time of increasingly rapid change induced by growing oil wealth. However, there was also enough left of the physical, social and economic structure of the pre-oil period to envisage the rural communities as they had been before oil exports began from Oman or its neighbouring Gulf States.

In order to define the term ‘rural community’ and emphasise its virtues the positive characteristics of an idealised pre-oil rural community in northern Oman are itemised, taking the Dhahira village of Araqi as an example. This underlines the real strength and virtues of a rural community, as here defined, but it also shows how vulnerable to economic and social dislocation the rural community became when faced with rapid change. Pre-oil, the idealised rural community maintained its virtuous condition only by reason of its isolation from the world beyond its borders. Change, when it came, brought many benefits, in standards of health and education for example, and in some respects change meant that the small rural communities were beneficially subsumed into what was becoming a more integrated national community. Nevertheless, it will be argued here that the process of change brought many and real losses to the local communities, causing rural dislocation as an unfortunate by-product of rural and national development.

The detailed studies focused on anthropological and demographic parameters, and agriculture, hydrology and water management, soils, livestock, crafts, fisheries and marketing. They describe the rural and farm systems as they had been and illustrate the true nature and extent of the dislocation of the rural communities associated with the rapid changes that was in full flow by the 1970s. They also, therefore, indicate the important requirement at that time for a ‘re-development’ of Oman’s rural communities. The requirement, however, was not to recreate these communities as they had been in pre-oil days, which would in any case have been impossible due to the all-pervasive nature of the oil economy and the growing national role of the government. The requirement was for growth based on acceptable modifications to the range of traditional activities, designed to achieve higher yet sustainable levels of economic returns whilst maintaining community structures intact.

2.1 An Idealised Pre-Oil Village Community

A principal characteristic of our idealised rural community of Araqi was the interdependence of its inhabitants (Dutton, 1983b). Each member of the community played a communal role, and each member of the community was reliant upon the other members playing their roles. This inter-reliance was the essence of the concept of community, and was the glue which held the community together. Each person was critically aware of the importance of the contribution made by other individuals towards the maintenance of the community as a whole. Interdependence was consequent upon the fact that the rural community catered for most of its own needs, everyone using their complementary skills. A high proportion of food and other material requirements were either grown or manufactured locally, by making full use of local resources and by developing the necessary human skills to undertake the work involved. Non material needs, including educational and spiritual needs, were also provided by local specialists in these fields.

Interdependence created a significant degree of effective independence from the world outside. Independence shielded the idealised rural community from changes in the world that lay beyond the community’s control. And to the extent that it was truly reliant on its own resources the community knew, in a fundamental way, that it alone was responsible for the maintenance of the community; responsible economically, socially, materially and spiritually. Independence, therefore, threw responsibility for maintaining the community onto its members. Accepting such a responsibility implied an awareness on the part of the community as a whole that each individual had to return as much to the community’s social, material, economic and spiritual system as he or she took from it. This balance had to be maintained not only to ensure that everyone today could satisfy their rightful requirements, but also to ensure that the rightful requirements of future generations would also be catered for.

The creation and maintenance of the balance between satisfying today’s requirements and providing for future needs, in turn implied a form of control to prevent the balance being lost. The control, however, had to be dynamic; it had to be flexible and responsive to changing circumstances.

One consequence of accepting responsibility for catering for the needs of future generations was that our idealised community lived in harmony with its physical environment. The farmers used water carefully, sowed their own seed, and kept their land in good heart. The artisans understood the nature and value of the raw materials with which they worked, and therefore treated them with due respect. Such a community also took responsibility for its own education, training and spiritual well-being. The idealised community as a whole may be said to have understood the meaning of ‘sustainable development’ long before the phrase was coined.

The idealised characteristics of the village community given above are based on a series of studies of the village of Araqi, in the Dhahira, made as part of the study of a cross-section of northern Oman mentioned above. By the time the study was being made the village was already undergoing rapid change, and it is doubtful whether the village in this idealised form ever truly existed. But it is hoped that the idealisation will usefully illustrate two points. First, the benefits that accrue to the community from interdependence and independence, and second, the vulnerability of the community, and the interdependence and independence of its people, to the forces of rapid regional change induced by oil.

Five decades ago, before the discovery of oil in Oman, or the full exploitation of oil resources in other parts of the Arabian peninsula (Penrose, 1971), it could have been argued that rural communities in Oman had retained their traditional independence based on the effective interdependence of the people living in them. The inhabitants of a village such as Araqi were mutually dependent on each others skills. With these skills they made full and effective use, at the level of technology then available to them, of the local resources. Primordial amongst these resources was water, provided for the village as a whole by a singl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Tables
• Figures
• Acronyms
• Glossary
• Project expatriate personnel
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Rural Communities Under Change: Development or Disintegration?
• 3. The Khabura Project: Design
• 4. The Khabura Project: Field Trials, Demonstrations and Training
• 5. From a Sub-Regional to a National Programme
• 6. Prospect and Retrospect
• Khabura Project reports and other publications cited