Modern agriculture as we know it today has mainly developed in the “black-soil-belt” of the world. Those top productive regions for agriculture exist mainly in temperate zones of the world and they are surprisingly rare.
The Green revolution in the Seventies brought many low-yield regions of the world into the high-yield fold but it depends on a lot of technological and mostly fertilizer input. Take fertilizer out and they quickly revert to the low-yield places they used to be. And if one’s agricultural production numbers depend on a commodity that’s coming from far away and world trade slumps, heavy problems are bound to pop up.
Dry regions and especially deserts are the quintessential low-yield regions of the world and it’s not only for a lack of water. The soils are incredibly unsuited for agriculture or even outright toxic. Combined with the price of water, this requires new thinking and tinkering with solutions to find out what works best. Thats not an armchair activity but must be tested out in the real world to see what works and what does not.
Al Nahl not only wants to remedy this situation, but it also wants to use the specific advantages dry regions bring for boosting their productivity so much that they can feed the world.
