Saudi Arabia sees peak water, abandons agriculture
January 29th, 2008 by Jim JustEarlier this month Reuters reported that Saudi Arabia has decided to stop all subsidies to agriculture:
“Saudi Arabia is abandoning a 30-year program to grow wheat that achieved self-sufficiency but depleted the desert kingdom’s scarce water supplies. . . The kingdom aims to rely entirely on imports by 2016.”
The article quoted an unnamed official:
“The reason is water resources.”
Saudi farmers used 1,300-1,500 cubic meters of water for every ton of wheat produced. As Ugo Bardi puts it at The Oil Drum: Europe, “the desert is going to win back the land it had ceded to agriculture.”
Bardi puts his finger on the problem:
“Saudi Arabian food production has been based on “fossil water.” It is water from ancient aquifers that can’t be replaced by natural processes in times of interest for human beings. Fossil water is non renewable, just as oil is, and it is unavoidable that it has to run out one day or another.”
Water production in Saudi Arabia reached a peak in the early 1990s, at more than 30 billion cubic meters per year. Today it is at around 15 billion cubic meters, less than half than the peak value. At peak, 90% of the Saudi water came from non-renewable aquifers.
Saudi Arabia is not an isolated case in Middle East and North Africa. Several countries in the region, notably Libya, depend heavily on fossil water.