The Arab Food Miracle In Making
4. Just don’t ask how much it costs. (Reading time: 7 mins)
What comes to your mind when I mention the “United Arab Emirates”?
Maybe Dubai and its glitzy lifestyle that seems to keep half the Instagram fashion influencers employed. Maybe the Bugatti and Porsche driving cops who believe style matters as much as substance when catching bad guys. Maybe the Burj Khalifa. Or maybe it’s UAE’s mockery of human rights with flogging, stoning and legally mandated misogyny that would make 15th century Europe jealous. Either way, you won’t be wrong.
But it’s unlikely you thought of the Arab miracle in making: Food. Because the biggest miracles always hide in plain sights. Or, in the UAE’s case, its supermarkets. When I recently stumbled onto the data that UAE has the highest yield for cereal crops in the world (shown in chart), I knew I had to dig into this mystery. Because…
Less than 1% of UAE’s land is suitable for agriculture.
The UAE is a tiny country in a hot, arid desert where the odds of finding arable land are far lower than the odds of their football team qualifying for the world cup (once). It has minimal ground and surface water sources, and rains are rare.
Frequent dust storms make crop cultivation a gamble. Then you have the desert soil, which is of poor quality and can barely hold water, making it unsuitable for any agricultural operation at scale.
This has some unpleasant security and geopolitical implications. UAE imports around 90% of its food1. The Emirati government has been nervous about this dependence, especially with import disruptions due to low yields, economic crisis, the pandemic and wars. But it has long been preparing for these disruptions, and the efforts are finally bearing fruit (pun intended).
Air-conditioned Farming, Dubai Style
The Emirati solution doubled down on climate controlled agriculture, with massive, vertical farms inside buildings. The key is hydroponics, which is a cool technique to grow crops without soil. Instead, all the nutrients that the crops usually extract from soil are injected into the water. The water then flows through the roots and plants get their nutrition, precisely fed and timed for maximum yield.
Plants also need light, and that comes from LED panels, dialed to the exact intensity that helps them grow the fastest. In fact, every climate variable inside the room - ambient temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide concentration is precision controlled by engineers, technicians and software optimizing its every hour of existence. This is a game changer, because you can do things impossible in traditional agriculture. For instance:
Land area does not matter, because a vertical hydroponics farm can have several floors of farms in a building, making it incredibly space efficient and dense. Think of what skyscrapers did to population density.
Seasons do not matter, because the building weather is entirely under human control. In fact, UAE hydroponic farms are producing twelve cycles of lettuce a year, while a traditional outdoor farm can only produce four because of natural seasons.
That is how you get the highest crop yield in the world. And they are just getting started. Dehumidifiers can extract water from the air when they need to reduce humidity and reuse this water for the plants. A Hydroponics startup in the UAE uses around 90% less water than outdoor farms, a crucial metric for a country that pays more for water than gasoline.
The UAE offers a glimpse of what climate change adaptation could look like for countries that are drying up. Just in 2009, the UAE had 50 hydroponics farms. Now it has over 1000. That is a 1900% increase.
Another hydroponics startup in Dubai announced it can produce 2500 tons of tomatoes per day on its farm of just 1 hectare. UAE markets and restaurants are now regularly stocking fruits, vegetables and grains grown locally in the desert. This also indirectly avoids the carbon footprint of shipping tomatoes from overseas. Another benefit is the lack of pesticides, as we do not expose the plants to the outdoors.
Now, you might think the Emiratis are fully onboard the climate-controlled farming train. But guess what? They still need water. They still have a tiny bit of land that can be farmed, and they’re still super bummed that it doesn’t rain. Which brings us to …
… The Rainmakers
The UAE has invested heavily in cloud-seeding since the 1940s. Cloud seeding is a technique to produce rain artificially, by shooting chemicals at clouds from airplanes2. It is a controversial and risky technology with little scientific consensus on its negative aftereffects, as it can mess with nature’s delicate weather systems which we do not fully understand. In fact, science is not even sure if cloud seeding actually works, or if the rains are just a fortunate coincidence.
In 2019, Dubai got flooded, with accusations of cloud-seeded rain experiments going off rails. As a desert city unprepared for rain, life came to a standstill, and the UAE spent millions of dollars on infrastructure. But farms were happy. Some scientists claim it was because of climate change-induced extreme weather, but the cloud seeding program also claimed “success”. All in all, Mission failed successfully.
Not All Climate Adaption Tech is Scalable
Though its efforts are laudable, UAE’s solution is not scalable in its current form.
Hydroponics farms have a large starting cost, much like any factory. They consume a lot of energy, because of expensive infrastructure and technology to climate-control large indoor farms. There is also a cost of providing 100% of the plant nutrition artificially3.
Cloud seeding to address water scarcity is a feature of the entire middle east, not just the UAE. In the past, Iran has already accused the UAE of “stealing rains” by “making Iranian clouds not rainy”. But that was the old tech.
The new tech apparently produces three times more rain. Considering the nations of the Persian Gulf have a long and rich history of … well, not liking each other, water scarcity can be a new nightmare in a geopolitically fragile region.
UAE is adapting to its future climate (which sounds a lot like its current climate, only worse). But is it sustainable? You be the judge:
All Its electricity comes from 100% natural gas.
Nearly half of its water comes from desalination plants which are extremely energy intensive4 and powered by 100% natural gas.
With an average temperature of 85 Fahrenheit (29 C) UAE has a totally-normal-completely-justified world’s only indoor ski resort where its always 30 F (-1 C) inside, and is powered by ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? 100% natural gas5.
UAE has one of the highest per capita water usage rates in the world. I am no expert, but does making 30 tons of artificial snow a day and having 11 water parks in the desert have something to do with it?
Climate adaptation takes different forms. What’s good for the goose may not be good for the gander. The UAE has a combination seen in few places on earth: Extreme wealth, vast oil & gas reserves, and a small population. Opulence is not just an option, but the mundane drudgery of life in the UAE.
Conclusion
The UAE model shows its possible to be technologically advanced in climate adaptation and still be ridiculously unsustainable and extravagant if the economics allow it6. Climate adaption should be sustainable and at least theoretically viable to resource-constrained parts of the world.
Yet the UAE is an incubator of innovative agricultural technologies for survival in a hostile climate. Hydroponics farms exist worldwide, but no other nation has committed to it with the urgency, innovation and scale of the UAE, as its future depends on it. Technology takes on fundamentally different economic characteristics when scaled, and the UAE is becoming the silicon valley of hydroponics.
As anyone in tech knows, every product needs some early adopters who will pay a lot for experimental products before it becomes cheaper for the open market. Example: Once expensive, solar panel prices have dropped 80% since 2010.
This has implications far beyond the UAE.
Climate change will make many parts of the world resemble the UAE today. These regions are struggling to support farming with less water, like the American Southwest, The Australian Outback, the Atacama desert (especially the Chile-Bolivia border), the Sahel region in the Sahara, and Andalusia in Southern Spain. On the flip-side, these are some of the most favorable solar energy hotspots on earth.
Hydroponics doesn’t have to become as cheap as traditional farming, and it probably never will. But we don’t need it to: We just need it to be cheap enough for solar energy to power large indoor farms. If we play our cards right, you can enjoy fresh, leafy salads for lunch in the Sahara desert, from the building right next door!
I am optimistic. What do you think?
Thank you for reading Climatonomics. Please leave a comment with your thoughts, and subscribe and share with your friends if you find this useful! As a young publication, I would greatly appreciate your encouragement.
Data Source: Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2013) - "Crop Yields". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields' [Online Resource]
Source: USDA report https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/opportunities-us-agricultural-exports-uae
Normal pilots always avoid bad weather. But not cloud seeding pilots. They fly into thunderstorms to release seeding chemicals, as this won’t work otherwise. Part of me wants this job (the insane part).
UAE has the highest fertilizer use in the world. Fertilizer production is carbon intensive and mining the necessary resources for it is unsustainable. Also, all of it is imported. If the goal is to promote self sufficiency in food, that might be a problem down the road.
Desalination involves boiling sea water for purification to get fresh water. Boiling is an expensive, fossil fuel intensive process and generates a lot of waste, which is why its not a viable large-scale alternative for most countries.
The indoor ski resort contributes approximately 500 tons of GHG emissions per year which is equivalent to the resulting GHG emissions from 900 round trip commercial flights from Dubai to Germany. Source: Shahbaz, Muhammad, Rashid Sbia, and Helmi Hamdi. "The Environmental cost of Skiing in the Desert? Evidence from Cointegration with unknown Structural breaks in UAE." (2013): 1-42.
This is pretty interesting, I've never stopped to think about how countries in the middle of the desert can be self sufficient in terms of agriculture. Can't wait to read your next post.
Yikes. This brings home the point that is made again and again. There's always a technological solution. However, in almost all cases, the technological solution is incredibly energy-intensive, and usually goes back to fossil fuels. You'd think that such an environment would be able to use solar, though. Surely if there was anywhere in the world capable of doing that, it would be these countries. And if they did, the systems they came up with may be very efficient with other resources, like fertiliser, not pouring it onto the fields and letting it end up in the atmosphere and waterways like New Zealand does. I'll try to be optimistic.