Driving south-east out of Riyadh, the highway soon snakes its way through scruffy desert and offers a glimpse of something of the unexpected in Saudi Arabia.
There you find “fields” where once there was only desert, with huge irrigation pivots that appear longer than a football pitch is wide, spraying water on to crops. Saudi Arabia has neither rivers nor lakes, yet the desert-kingdom boasts a thriving dairy and arable industry. The latter is largely the result of an initiative during the 1970s oil boom for the kingdom to become wheat self-sufficient. After spending tens of billions of dollars, the project succeeded – amazingly, to the point where the kingdom was a wheat exporter in the 1980s.
But last year the government acknowledged that producing 2.5m tons of wheat a year was unsustainable and production is to be phased out by 2016. The decision coincided with a food crisis that triggered a massive spike in prices and caused producing countries to introduce export restrictions.
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