Booming Gulf looks overseas for agriculture needs

In the dunes around this sun-scorched desert village, where camels still plod along dusty roads an hour south of Dubai's skyscrapers, they're making the wasteland bloom.

 

Row upon row of bell peppers grow plump in a temperature-controlled greenhouse. Lilies and roses bud nearby, and strawberries are on their way, all thanks to sophisticated water-saving irrigation.

 

Yet even high-tech establishments like the Mirak Agricultural Services farms here and elsewhere in this riverless country will never feed the region's rapidly growing population. It's that realization that is persuading wealthy Gulf Arabs to look far beyond their shores for more fertile acreage  tens of thousands of acres, in some cases.

 

There are simply too many mouths to feed and not enough water. Lush urban landscaping and ambitious agricultural projects here and in Saudi Arabia _ which once spent so much on farm subsidies that it exported surplus wheat _ are quickly draining aquifers, including some that are millennia old and cannot be refilled.

 

'It's like oil,' said Julia Bucknall, a World Bank researcher who has written about the region's water use. 'It's essentially a nonrenewable resource.'

 

That stark reality _ and rising food prices _ is sending the region's leaders scrambling to lock up even more long-term food supplies abroad. And where once the region was content to spend its petrodollars on food sold on the open market, Gulf nations now are quietly scouring the globe for rich farmland to rent or buy outright.

 

The prime ministers of Qatar and Kuwait traveled separately to Cambodia this year to discuss securing paddy land for rice-growing. UAE President Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan visited Kazakhstan in central Asia, where agricultural investments were likewise high on the agenda.

 

Dubai World, a sprawling conglomerate controlled by that emirate's government, last month said it was creating a new subsidiary targeting global investments in a wide range of commodities, including food.

 

Plans are also accelerating in the private sector.

The Saudi Binladin Group, for example, is considering investing more than $4 billion to grow food in Indonesia, said Salim Segaf al-Jufri, the Indonesian ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Under the proposed project, the company would produce basmati rice in Sulawesi, Papua and western Java.