California Could Be the Next Saudi Arabia
In the early 1980s, Saudi Arabia embarked upon a bold project: It began to transform large swaths of desert landscape into wheat farms.
Now, "desert agriculture" isn't quite the oxymoron it might sound like. These arid zones offer ample sunlight and cool nights, and harbor few crop-chomping insects, fungal diseases, or weed species. As long as you can strategically add water and fertilizer, you'll generate bin-busting crops. And that's exactly what Saudi Arabia did. As this Bloomberg News piece shows, the oil-producing behemoth grew so much wheat for about two decades that "its exports could feed Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Yemen."
Stuart Rankin