SAUDI ARABIA: DESERT WHEAT FARMING AND DREAMING BIG DREAMS

Wheat fields in Saudi Arabia. Source: YouTube.

By Gundhramns Hammer
June 7, 2015

When some humans have endless amounts of money and the know-how in their hands, many well paid and trained scientists and technicians at their service and backed or manipulated by ambitious entrepreneurs that only think of making more money, given the chance to dream or made to dream of pharaonic projects, they will go to it.

Common sense is pushed aside and mammoth undertakings are on the way soon.

This is exactly what happened in Saudi Arabia with wheat growing.

Anybody with good common sense would have quickly seen that growing wheat is a desert and relying on a finite subterranean aquifer for irrigation was not a sound idea at all.

But Saudis went ahead anyway. 

Thus the Kingdon of Saudi Arabia (KSA) became one of the biggest exporters of wheat a while back.

In 2008, KSA was able to produce over 2 million tons of wheat (Muhammad, 2014).

But the Kingdom soon rejected this grand project of desert wheat farming due to its negative affect on its water resources, according to Muhammad (2014). 

Now Saudi Arabia intends to stop wheat production by 2016 

So Saudis have realised that no one can fool Mother Nature.

It is now a matter of choosing between wheat production or saving water resources in Saudi Arabia (Video 1). This makes sense.

Video 1. Wheat farming in Saudi Arabia.

But Saudis have not given up their wheat dream yet. They have taken it somewhere else. 

They have put their dream onto Ethiopia, Mali, Senegal, Ghana and other African countries.

Recently, Saudi investors have been busy buying millions of hectares of land overseas to produce food and ship it back home and beyond.

Thus, some Saudi Arabian companies have become land grabbers in Africa. 

As a result, land grabbing by Saudi Arabian entrepreneurs has become a pain in the neck for the local people in some countries. 

For example, indigenous Awak people depend on the Alwero river for their survival in Ethiopia´s Gambela region.

But now,  Saudi-based billionaire Mohammed al-Amoudi is irrigating his plantations with water diverted from the Alwero River. 

These mammoth irrigation projects will screw up the Awaks in the long run.

For the time being, the land grabbing Saudi investors do not seem to be concerned about somebody else ending up without water.

When the name of the game is money, poor people simply become game in the name of the money game.

And what is really sad and fucking stupid in this economic game for gain is that we see Nature simply as an object for the taking and screwing up without ever really worrying the negative consequences for everyone in the future.

The truth of the matter is that despite that some of our dreams or daydreams may appear to be or be good dreams in dreamland, this does not necessarily mean that in the land of reality our dreams will become real fruit bearing dreams, the kind that do not make us sick whilst dreaming of dreaming big dreams.

And man loves dreaming of big dreams.

But the way we humans are going - always messing up the Biosphere wherever we put our butt - chasing a big dream in the name of our cannibalistic economic game, our dreams may soon come to an end.

Remember, no one can fuck up Mother Nature without ever getting or ending up fucked up himself.

Nature is unforgiving.

When will we learn that?


References

Muhammad F. (2014). KSA to stop all wheat production by 2016. Saudi Gazette, Thursday, 11 December 2014.