الأنماط الزراعية في الوطن العربي

Agricultural patterns in the Arab world

This research aims at identifying the principal agricultural patterns in the Arab World, analyzing their main characters, and explaning the main factors that contribute to their spatial variation. A total of 19 variables taken from the 2009 annual report of the Arab Organization for Agricultural Development were used for analysis. Factor analysis is used to summarize these variables in the main factor components, and to determine the main factor loadings of the variables on the factor components, and to determine the percentage of variance explained by each factor. The main findings of this research suggest that six factors explain more than 83% of the total variance of the spatial variation of the agricultural patterns. The various Arab countries were classified into main groups according to the loadings of these countries upon the main factor components that represent the agricultural pattern that each country follows. Keywords: Agricultural Patterns, Factor Analysis, Arab World.