72 SOCIAL SCIENTIST served as a stimulus for these trading and financial interests, supported by French tax money and the savings of small European farmers.8 The French planners who drew up the so-called Plan of Constan-tine in 1959-1960 in an attempt to secure French economic if no longer political dominance in Algeria by organizing rapid economic development explicitly recognized that such a process of development could only be based on industrialization. There were plans to develop the traditional (Algerian owned) sector of agriculture, but Domoulin® for example wanted to spend only 9.3 percent of the planned investments on agriculture, including irrigation works, in the department of Bone. This is a low percentage, even in comparison with the 10-15 percent of the national budget that later independent Algerian governments have spent on agriculture. Amin10, writing on the economic prospects of Algeria shortly after independence, advised that 12 percent of public investment should be spent on agriculture in the period 1970-1990. Agrarian Structure The problem of the development of Algerian agriculture was and is complicated by the fact that there exist two very different agricultural sectors, usually called the ^mo^rn" and the ^traditional" sectors. The ^mollern" sector consisted in the colonial period of the French-owned farms. French colonists had since 1930 obtained most of the best land through the confiscation of the Turkish state-lands, land owned by religious foundations and land of rebelling tribes, by the appropriation of ^unused" tribal lands (usually in fact lands used for pasture and or agriculture with long fallow periods) and by purchase from debt-ridden or legally cheated Arab owners." By a process of concentration of land holdings these French farmers gradually reached some degree of prosperity, but because of a general shortage of agriculture credit they tended to concentrate on extensive forms of farming that gave the highest returns on invested capital but did not maximize the gross productivity per surface unit. The Algerian rural population, rapidly growing since about 1875, was driven to the poorer land. often located on hillsides, which were formerly not or only infrequently used for agriculture or even for pasture-Lack of other economic opportunities forced them to over-exploit the land, causing exhaustion of the soil and erosion. Lack of education and capital caused them to stick to traditional methods of cultivation resulting in a low productivity. Between these two sectors a third intermediary sector of Algerian owned farms developed. Remarkably little is known about this group of Algerian medium and big landowners. In 1951 Europeans owned about 2.7 million hectares of land, Muslims 7.3 million hectares. Of the latter 7.3 million hectares about 2.5 million hectares were owned by about 25,000 Muslim landowners owning more than 50 hectares each. Some of