There are reports that a delegation of Saudi businessmen who recently traveled to the United States to convince Americans to come and invest in the Kingdom offered the Americans investment opportunities in the agricultural sector. I don’t know how the majority of people feel when discussion turns to investing in agriculture, but I panic every time the matter is raised. This is because those who invest in the sector calculate all the costs they will incur — with the exception of water. It never occurs to them to figure how much a gallon of water will cost them, simply because they do not bear the cost but you and I do. What the investor pays is minimal and he gets subsidized fuel, power and other necessities.
Water consumption in the Kingdom has been rising rapidly since the 1970s. This has resulted from the expansion of both the traditional sectors and the newly established urban and industrial users. The boom years led to the emergence of giant water-guzzling agricultural companies whose farms consumed huge quantities of water round the clock just to produce tomatoes, cucumbers and radishes. Then our farmers began to grow wheat and barley — two crops that consume water. The result was that a few people got richer while future generations were deprived of an indispensable source of life that could never be compensated for.
Those companies, together with the thousands of farmers draining our scarce water resources, have never been concerned with water because water is a public matter. All they were concerned about was profits since these are a private matter. Profits have always been what direct investors.
It can be said, however, that local investments in agriculture have helped secure sources of income for some people but the income came at a high cost indeed. The authorities had to intervene to formulate a national water plan when particularly serious problems were encountered with overpumping from wells which had drastically lowered the water table. The problem was further complicated by the lack of sewage treatment which led to the contamination of groundwater. Substantive, but very few, changes in water supplies have been instituted, but the serious depletion of water resources has continued.
In just five years during the boom, water consumption more than tripled — from 190 million cubic meters in 1980 to 574 million cubic meters in 1985. By 1990 water usage had jumped to 900 million cubic meters with agriculture being the prime water user, accounting for 85 percent of the Kingdom’s consumption.
The government’s policy of providing water free to the sector, combined with new water-intensive methods of farming, have been the main factors for this increase.
The question is why we should invite investors from America to invest in the agricultural sector. The Ministry of Water never ceases publishing advertisements urging water conservation, especially at home even though domestic consumption represents only a tiny fraction of that used by the agricultural sector.
We must not fool ourselves. Ours is a desert country with no flowing rivers and no substantial rainfall. It is time we stopped talking about agricultural investments and started saving what is left of our water for future generations.
