Page 299 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

296 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

revenues were spent. So far as he was concerned, the chief purpose of this
expenditure was to consolidate and aggrandize his own power, any benefits

that might accrue to the Persian people being incidental or subordinate to that
purpose. Persia, her oil and natural gas resources notwithstanding, is a rela­
tively poor country, and the Persians, whatever their native talents, are a poor
and backward people. Malnutrition is widespread among them, the infant
mortality rate is tragically high and life expectancy is correspondingly low.

Only 25 per cent of them, as we have seen, are literate, and their general
standard of living is a meagre one. What they needed above all was improve­
ments in agriculture. Persia was, and still is, predominantly an agricultural
country, with 40 per cent or more of her people engaged in farming of one kind
or another. Fairly substantial sums were allocated to the improvement of the
country’s agriculture in the fourth and fifth quinquennial development plans

(i.e. from 1968 to 1978), but the overall results were hardly impressive.
Experiments were made with large-scale commercial farming, on the Ameri­
can ‘agribusiness’ model, with substantial capital and the assistance of foreign
experts. Four such ventures in Khuzistan in the early 1970s all proved financial

disasters. At the other end of the scale, there was little more success with the
small individual farms of eleven hectares or less, to which the majority of
landholdings had been reduced by the land reform programme. The burden of
the past, whether in the form of social distinctions, religious prejudices, the
grip of the landholders upon the peasant cultivators, disease, ignorance,
illiteracy, corruption or resistance to innovations, proved almost impossible to

shift - which only went to show how irrelevant, in the end, the land reforms
had been.
The achievements of the ‘white revolution’ in the fields of health and
education were not much more encouraging. That there was some improve­

ment was undeniable - as well as unavoidable in view of the sums of money
expended. But the results hardly matched the shah’s claims that he had lifted
his people out of a slough of disease and ignorance. A single instance may
perhaps suffice to illustrate the wide gap between promise and fulfilment in the
*
Persia of the 1970s.
In 1974 the Persian government announced that it intended to provide

20,000 new hospital beds by 1978. The initial phase of the programme envis­
aged the construction of fifteen hospitals with a capacity of 6,000 beds. As the
shah insisted that only the best that Western technology could supply would
suffice, the estimates submitted by Western contractors were of a commensu­
rate order. Drift, delay and indecision on the part of the Persian ministries

concerned caused the estimated cost per bed to rise, by the time the final bids
were submitted, to 38.8 million rials, or over $500,000. The Persian
government’s reaction to this unwelcome news was to cancel the contracts on

• It is one of many recounted by Robert Graham, a correspondent of the Financial Tmu stanoned in Tehran
during the boom years, in his valuable study, Iran, the Illusion of Power.