Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
I Food Sources:
Earth, Water, and Air
1. Agriculture and
Irrigation
language of agricultural workers. The fol-
lowing articles will deal primarily with
agricultural methods and techniques.
Agriculture (Ar. filāa )
i.—Middle East
Fal , the act of cleaving and cutting,
when applied to the soil has the mean-
ing of “to break up in order to cultivate”,
or “to plough”. Fallā “ploughman”,
filāa “ploughing”. But from pre-Islamic
times the word filāa has assumed a wider
meaning to denote the occupation of hus-
bandry, agriculture. In this sense it is syn-
onymous with zirāa , to which the ancients
preferred filāa (all the earlier writers
called their works on agriculture Kitāb
al-Filāa ). At the present time this latter
word is very widely used in North Africa,
both in official language and in everyday
speech. Thus, in Morocco, the Ministry
of Agriculture is called wizārat al-filāa ,
whilst in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan
and Irā it is called wizārat al-zirāa . It is
only since the last century that the word
zirāa has taken precedence in official and
literary circles in the Arab East; but the
word filāa is still very widely used in the
1.— Technical and historical survey
Agriculture in the Arab countries is
under the influence of two different types
of climate: in the south of the Arabian pen-
insula (Yemen, aramawt and Umān),
and also in the Sudan, the Indian mon-
soon brings abundant rainfall in summer
which enables various tropical plants to
be cultivated (coffee, datepalms, custard-
apples, mangoes, pawpaws, bananas, catha
edulis , tamarinds etc.). Throughout the
rest of the Arab world the mediterranean
climate prevails. This climate is character-
ized by a cold wet winter season, followed
by a long summer period which is hot and
without rain. The further one goes from
the Mediterranean coast the more the
rainfall diminishes, until it ceases entirely
in certain hot deserts in Arabia and the
African Sahara. This basic climatic system
divides the zones of Arab countries into
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