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Tribal Rebellion, Marxist Revolution 153

government has a 60 per cent shareholding, Compagnie Frangaise des

Petroles 4 per cent and Partex 2 per cent), estimates that the cost of
developing the Dhufar fields to produce the minimum of 30,000 barrels
a day required to make the investment commercially worth while would be

$200 to $250 million.
Other oil companies have lately begun exploring in Oman. A consortium in

which British Petroleum is a partner has been granted a concession for that part
of Dhufar not conceded to PDO, and has hopes of discovering a southern
extension of the Shaiba field of the northern Rub al-Khali. Elf-Aquitaine of
France has an off-shore concession in the Gulf of Oman, and Gulf Oil and
another American company are prospecting in northern Oman. Subsidiaries of
the Italian ENI are to construct a gas-gathering system in the central Omani
oilfields, from which gas will be carried by a pipeline through the Hajar

mountains to the coast near Muscat, to provide energy for the electricity
generating system, the water desalination plant and the further industrial
development that is hoped for. Yet none of these schemes offers a realistic
prospect of increasing the revenues Oman receives from oil, or even of making
good to any substantial extent the loss in revenue that may be expected from
declining production. Already the sultan’s government has fallen into the habit

of raising loans abroad, and not merely from its richer neighbours, to help meet
the cost of its ambitious schemes of development. The habit may well turn into
an addiction, and a highly expensive one to satisfy.
The second reason for scepticism about the direction the expenditure of oil
revenues has taken is that so little money has been devoted to improving the
natural economy of the country. This economy has been sustained throughout
Oman’s history by agriculture, pastoralism and trade with the world outside.

Oman’s overwhelming need is to improve its agriculture. It possesses the
geography, the climate and even the rainfall, limited though it is, to create a
self-supporting, balanced economy, one which, while it may not provide its
people with more than a modest standard of living, will endure long after the
more spectacular attempts at industrialization now going on in the other oil

states have come to naught. Since Oman’s oil reserves have all too short a life
ahead of them, there is obviously not much time available in which to effect a
transformation in the country’s agriculture. Yet nothing is at present being
done commensurate with the scale of the effort required to complete such a
transformation. Instead, the bulk of the oil revenues is being spent upon
essentially unproductive undertakings, however worthy they may be, like
public buildings, housing, the armed forces and the police, or upon so-called

prestige’ enterprises, whose purpose is to gratify local yearnings after
grandeur or to match the splendours that have sprung up in the oil states
to the north. Even more regrettable than the misuse of the oil revenues has
been the damage done to the country’s most precious resource, water, by the
irresponsible use of mechanical pumps (by all who could afford to buy them)