Evaluation of Agricultural Sector Strategies in Five Year Development Plans in Iran

Evaluation of strategies of agricultural sector facilitates to identify bottlenecks and limitations in the process of national development and helps, on the other hand, to make changes if seems necessary. This article aims to evaluate strategies of agriculture sector during the past two decades using descriptive approach based on Delfi method. Assessment of the documents related to the past four Five Year Development Plans indicated that more than a hundred policies and strategies pertaining to the agricultural development have been passed by the Islamic Consultative Assembly. Out of these policies, those which had important role in the sector were selected based on principle of strategic management for evaluation. The result of evaluation revealed that in spite of implementing four development plans during the past 20 years, the major technical and environmental problems still exist mainly due to lack of using strategic management principles, low level of management at macro level and poor implementation of policies.