Agriculture in Cyprus
[1] During the 1960s, irrigation projects made possible vegetable and fruit exports; increasingly commercialized farming was able to meet the demands for meat, dairy products, and wine from the British and United Nations troops stationed on the island and from the growing number of tourists.
[1] In the early 1970s, Cypriot farms, still overwhelmingly small owner-run units, furnished about 70 percent of commodity exports and employed about 95,000 people, or one-third of the island's economically active population.
[1] Given the expansion of the manufacturing and service sectors, however, agriculture's importance was declining, and in the first half of the 1970s its share of GDP amounted to 18 percent.
[1] The de facto division of the island in 1974 left the Turkish Cypriot community in the north in possession of agricultural resources that produced about four-fifths of the citrus and cereal crops, two-thirds of the green fodder, and all of the tobacco.
[1] The Turkish occupation caused a large-scale uncoordinated exchange of the agricultural work force between the northern and southern zones.
[1] The resulting substantial agricultural unemployment was countered by government actions that included financial assistance on easy terms to farmers.
[1] The island's favorable climate and its location near its leading market, Western Europe, however, meant that farming remains an important and stable part of the overall economy.
[1] Government irrigation projects, subsidies, and tax policies encouraged farming's existence, as did research in new crops and new varieties of ones already in cultivation.
[1] In addition to macroeconomic considerations, the government encouraged agriculture because it provided rural employment, which maintained village life and relieved urban crowding.
[1] Part-time agricultural work also permitted urban residents to keep in contact with their villages and gave them supplemental income.
[2] The average rainfall of 500 mm, mostly in the winter, left the island quite dry much of the rest of the time because no rivers flowed year round.
[2] During the colonial period, a dam and reservoir construction program was begun, and by independence Cyprus had sixteen dams with a storage capacity of six million cubic meters, or 1 percent of the island's estimated 600 million cubic meters of usable runoff from annual rainfall.
[2] After independence a number of large projects were mounted to increase reservoir storage capacity, which reached 300 million cubic meters by 1990.
[3] The largest private landowner was the Church of Cyprus, whose holdings before the Turkish invasion included an estimated 5.8 percent of the island's arable land.
[3] At the time of the 1946 law, fragmentation of land was already great, many holdings did not have access roads, and owners frequently possessed varying numbers of plots that might be separated by distances of several kilometers.
[3] The agricultural cooperative movement in Cyprus was founded in 1909 by a village society of farmers who had returned from an inspection tour of Britain and Germany.
[4] The Agricultural Bank, established in 1925 to furnish medium and long-term loans to farmers, functioned through the cooperative societies.
[6] Cereals (wheat and barley), legumes, vegetables (carrots, potatoes, and tomatoes), fruit and other tree crops (almonds, apples, bananas, carobs, grapes, grapefruit, lemons, melons, olives, oranges, and peaches).
[6] A shortage of suitable land and a need for irrigation meant that the potato's importance for Cypriot agriculture declined in the 1990s, but it would remain one of the sector's main supports.
[6] Systematic efforts were undertaken by the government to improve the quality of Cypriot grapes, and different kinds of wine were manufactured to increase exports, mainly to Europe.
[6] Deciduous tree crops common to temperate climates, including olives, apples, pears, peaches, carobs, and cherries, were also grown.
[6] Livestock products, including poultry and milk, made up a significant part of the gross output by value of the agricultural sector.
[7] Specialists believed that the gradual lifting of import restrictions, as required by the EEC Customs Union Agreement, would put many inefficient breeders of livestock out of business.
[8] By the second half of the 1980s, loans and subsidies from the Department of Fisheries had secured the existence of a fishing fleet of several hundred small vessels, and annual catches exceeded those preceding 1974.
