Until recently, the coastal lowlands supported few people and did not provide easy access to the interior. The mountains that constitute 70 percent of the country's area are difficult to traverse and generally inhospitable. Rivers are almost entirely unnavigable, and only in the south are there valleys wide enough to link the coast with the interior. By 1970 no railway and only three good roads crossed the national borders. The physical characteristics of the land have contributed to differing living conditions and social relationships in the various sectors of the country. Before independence in 1912, the area of modern Albania had never been politically integrated, nor had it ever been an economically viable unit. It owes its existence as a state to the ethnic factor, and survival of the ethnic group is attributable to the natural isolation of the country. The area is 11,100 square miles. The boundaries, established in principle in 1913 and demarcated in 1923, were essentially unchanged in 1970, although Greece had not dropped its claim to a large part of southern Albania. The eastern boundary divides the Macedonian lake district among three states--Albania, Greece, and Yugoslavia--that have ethnic populations in the area and follows high mountain ridges wherever possible to the north and south of the lakes. The northern and southern borders were drawn to achieve a separation between the Albanians and neighboring nationalities, although there is a large group of Albanians in the Kosovo area of Yugoslavia across the northeastern border, and Greeks and Albanians intermingle in the southeast (see fig. 1). Resources are insufficient to make the country wealthy, and some that are available have not been thoroughly exploited. Interior regions have been inaccessible. Agricultural land has been inefficiently used for centuries because people having large landholdings preferred to maintain more profitable livestock herds rather than cultivate the earth for foodstuff production. Malaria, until the 1930s, prevented development or reclamation of the coastal lowlands. Lacking the capital investment necessary, extensive development projects had not been undertaken by 1970. The lowlands and the lower mountains of the south have a Mediterranean climate; weather in the northern and eastern highlands is dominated by the continental air masses that persist over central and Eastern Europe. Overall rainfall is plentiful throughout the country, but most areas receive it seasonally. Apart from the bare rock mountains and portions of the alluvial lowlands that are alternately parched and inundated, most of the land encourages a wide variety of wild vegetation. Areas suitable for cultivation, however, are small. There are good soils on about 5 percent of the land surface, but land three or four times that percentage is considered arable. Forests cover nearly one-half of the land. About one-fourth is suitable for grazing animals.