Page 91 - Arabian Studies (V)

Water Resources and Agriculture in Qatar 81

excessively high irrigation frequency, the rate of abandonment of
tenancies has increased from 21 in 1960to 115 in 1975.
In a typical vegetable farming unit winter and summer vegetable
crops receive approximately equal allocation of land. Tomato is the
main winter crop, grown from September to May, and melons are the
main summer crop, grown from March to June and again from
August to November. Other vegetables include carrot, onion, radish,
lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, eggplant, broadbean, cucumber,
squash, okra and marrow. On a typical vegetable-orchard-forage
crop farming unit, the combination of vegetable enterprises and the
proportion of land allocated to each are similar to that of the purely
vegetable farms but since additional land is allocated to orchards and
alfalfa (lucerne) the total area under vegetables is reduced to about
half. The remaining half of the farm is allocated to date, fig, pomegra­
nate, citrus, guava and alfalfa. On an orchard-forage crop farm unit
about 55 per cent of the cultivated land is allocated to date and 30 per
cent to alfalfa. The amount of current fallow land is relatively high, in
some cases as much as*50 per cent of the total area of the farm, as a
result of soil salinity, labour shortages and other constraints. There is
some evidence to show that farmers also practice a form of shifting
cultivation within the farm, moving from degraded to better soils
until such time as soil salinity has everywhere reached intolerable
limits, at which point the farm is abandoned.
Farm labour is an important productive factor in agriculture in
Qatar since farms are generally too small for the extended use of farm
machinery. However, because of immigration restrictions on agricul­
tural labour there is a general shortage during peak activity periods of
planting and harvesting. This is particularly acute on tenant farms
where the farmers, being immigrants themselves, are unable to
sponsor the entry of indentured labour from the traditional labour
market of Pakistan and India. As a result tenant farmers tend to pay
higher wages to attract indentured labour from farms where the land-
owner has sponsored their immigration. This situation has brought
about a high turn-over in labour resulting in delayed planting,
harvesting and a low level of interest among labourers. Many immi­
grant labourers are tribesmen from the extreme north-western
districts of Pakistan with no tradition of irrigated agriculture and are
unskilled labourers rather than farm-workers.
All the farms are irrigated by pumped groundwater from an
average of two wells per farm from depths ranging from 10 to 40m.
Water is led from a storage tank by furrow to the fields where irriga­
tion is either by flooded basin or by furrow between broad shoulders.
Irrigation frequency is very high and irrigation efficiency is generally
low. From recent investigations (Mitra, 1976) it is estimated that the