Qatar builds farms in the desert | Environment | Guardian Weekly

Qatar hopes to grow more crops in climate-controlled greenhouses, but water scarcity remains a problem. Photograph: Alamy

Jean-Pierre Moreau grows flowers – roses, gladioli and chrysanthemums – out in the desert, about 30km west of Doha. At the request of the emir of Qatar, Hamad Ben Khalifa al-Thani, the Frenchman is producing 4m flowers a year with a workforce of 60, mainly from Nepal and India.

Inside the 55,000 sq metres of greenhouses at Roza Hassad, the decor bears little resemblance to the stony, windswept landscape outside. At 30-second intervals the computerised control system adjusts the moisture and light in each of the 16 glass structures that recreate the climate conditions of the Netherlands or the tropics, depending on the flowers growing there.

The plants, rooted in a layer of coconut husks or a volcanic-rock compound, are irrigated from a well 100 metres underground. The water is desalinated and mixed with the nutrients the flowers need to grow. Roza Hassad is a showcase enterprise, a publicly owned firm set up to reduce the number of imported flowers.
Qatar builds farms in the desert | Environment | Guardian Weekly