Special Edition: The Greening of the Arab East

With famine threatening large regions of the Third World, Aramco World reporters returned this year to the farmlands of the Arab East to see what progress has been made by Arab planners and planters since our last survey of the regions's food output (See Aramco World, May-June 1978). As then, artist Norman MacDonald and contributing editor John Lawton traveled through the Fertile Cresent, the Arabian Penninsula and the Nile Delta—MacDonald sketching and painting on-the-scene impressions, Lawton interviewing farmers and agency officials and compiling the masses of statistics essential to a full grasp of the problems—and progress—of agriculture in the Arab East today.

Also contributing to this issue were Rami J. Khouri, Aramco World's correspondent in Jordan, and author of The Jordan Valley—Life and Society Below Sea Level; Arthur Clark, a contributing editor in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; free-lance writers Dr. June Taboroff from Saudi Arabian; Michael Spencer, reporting on dryland farming in Iraq; Terrence Gallacher, covering agriculture in the United Arab Emirates; Pat McDonnell from Syria and Ian Meadows from Cyprus. Together they helped assemble this report on a subject vital to the future of the entire Middle East—the region's drive to increase food self-sufficiency by the greening of the Arab East.