February 10, 2026
Cynthia Gharios
Cynthia Gharios is a researcher at the University of Münster, Germany. Her current research investigates the role of capital markets in the transition toward sustainable food systems. Her PhD work explored the intersections of oil, technology, agriculture, and climate in the UAE through the lenses of political ecology and STS. She has previously worked on AgTech intermediaries in the US, agricultural investments in Morocco, and agrarian transformation in Lebanon.
Arabic version
Rethinking the “Greening the Desert” Narrative
In one of the driest regions on earth, glass-and-steel greenhouses glow under the desert sun. Inside, rows of tomatoes, strawberries, and lettuce thrive in climate-controlled chambers powered by desalinated water and energy derived from oil and gas. This is not a science fiction experiment; it is the reality of agriculture in the Arabian Gulf. The paradox is striking. The agro-ecological context of the region – characterised by extremely low rainfall, limited renewable freshwater resources, saline soils, long sunshine hours, and frequent dust storms – made agriculture practices historically limited in geography and in scope. Yet today, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are reinventing themselves as agricultural innovators, investing heavily in hydroponics, aeroponics, precision irrigation, and artificial intelligence. These governments have pledged to achieve “food security” through advanced agricultural technologies. When talking about controlled environmental agriculture (CEA), the UAE Minister of State for Food Security Mariam bint Mohammed Almheiri stated in 2021 “[CEA] has become a game changer for us and many other countries with similar challenges and has made us re-think our plans in the domain of food security”.
The image of agriculture flourishing in arid lands is often celebrated as a triumph of human adaptability. Media portrayals of smart-farms across the Gulf are met with high hopes and expectations about the future of food and farming there. Within this frame, scarcity appears as a technical problem awaiting technical resolutions. Technology is thus presented as an apolitical solution to nature’s limits, aligning with the belief that humans could "engineer their way out of any environmental limits" (Koch 2022, 98). This narrative suggests that through innovation and technology, the Gulf could conquer its ecological limits. Such techno-optimistic explanations are not new. They have dominated the discourse around food and technology, primarily due to the depoliticization of technological issues. But this narrative is misleading. It conceals the political and economic forces that have made such “green deserts” possible. It also ignores the deep contradictions they embody. As such, technology is never neutral. Rather, how technologies are developed, and the technological and social mechanisms involved in their growth are ultimately political questions. The expansion of agriculture in the Gulf cannot be understood simply as an application of scientific know-how. It must be read as a political act – one that reorganizes relations between people, resources, and power. Desalination plants, irrigation systems, indoor farming, and agricultural technologies are not just infrastructures; they are instruments through which states project authority, define futures, and manage environmental uncertainty. Seen from this angle, the celebrated “agricultural miracle” of the Gulf is less a response to environmental necessity than an outcome of fossil capitalism. My contention is that technological systems in Gulf agriculture are not primarily an ecological response to scarcity. It is a political project rooted in oil wealth, rentier power, regional ambition, and technology relations. The question I ask here is: How is agriculture possible in the desert, and what does it tell us about oil economies? More broadly, what happens when oil wealth is mobilized to cultivate food systems in a desert?
To unpack these dynamics, my analysis draws on two complementary fields: Political Ecology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Political ecology is a critical field of research that explores how political, social, and economic power shape human–environment relations. It highlights how power and inequality shape who controls resources, who benefits from development, and who bears ecological costs. From this perspective, I understand environmental challenges not as isolated technical problems, but as deeply entangled with political power, resource control, and state-capital configurations: they reflect decisions about what is worth producing, how, and for whom. STS, on the other hand, asks how societies imagine technological futures. The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) captures how collective visions of progress – such as the dream of “greening the desert” – guide policy and shape technological design. Combining these two perspectives reveals how technologies are embedded in relations of power, economy, and environment. Technology does not simply respond to environmental limits; it creates new thresholds of possibility, while deepening certain forms of dependency and exclusion. Therefore, I adopt a political ecology of technology approach; an approach emphasizing that technologies are deeply intertwined with power relations, social structures, and environmental contexts (see also (Goldstein and Nost 2022; Boyer et al. In progress). This approach critiques the narratives that technology is objective and neutral, and seeks to uncover how technologies are shaped by (and, in turn, shape) political, social, and ecological dynamics. It is precisely in this tension – between the rhetoric of innovation and the reality of fossil dependence – that the Gulf’s agricultural transformations must be understood. In what follows, I show that Gulf agriculture is both material and symbolic: a material project sustained by energy-intensive infrastructures, and a symbolic project that legitimates political authority and economic diversification under the banner of sustainability.
Historical Backdrop: Oil, Modernization, and the Promise of Green Deserts
The modern history of agriculture in the Gulf cannot be separated from the rise of oil. Since the early 20th century, as oil was being discovered and extracted across the region, effort to modernize agricultural practices took place, often with the support of foreign actors. Agriculture – long marginal, small-scale, and labour-intensive – was being reimagined fuelled by oil revenue or the promise of it. Until the late 1990s, petroleum revenues enabled newly formed states to pursue ambitious modernisation projects that would symbolically and materially distance them from their pre-oil pasts. The desert, once seen as hostile, became the terrain upon which modernity itself would be performed.
Saudi Arabia was the first to attempt large-scale desert farming. In the 1930s, Al-Kharj Farm, initiated with American assistance through Aramco, sought to cultivate wheat, alfalfa, and other crops. This relied on intensive agricultural mechanisation, irrigation issued from drilling deep into fossil aquifers, and heavy use of pesticides and fertilizer. To support these developments, the Saudi government subsidised wells, fertilisers, and fuel, creating a brief period of apparent abundance. Expanding further following the 1970s oil boom, agricultural land nearly doubled between the 1960s and 2010s. By the 1980s, Saudi wheat production soared to the point of export. Yet this success was short-lived: it drew down non-renewable groundwater at alarming rates, salinized soils, and became financially untenable. By the early 2000s, the programme was dismantled.
The British authorities in the Trucial States also sought to modernise farming practices. In the 1940s, they engaged in water exploration efforts to improve the quantity and quality of water. They also initiated the Digdaga experimental farm and school to educate local populations on British led farming practices using machinery and imported crops. A decade later, Sheikh Zayed also sought to improve the agricultural context. The Arid Lands Research Centre on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi pioneered a hybrid system combining greenhouse farming and desalinated water. Funded by Abu Dhabi’s new found oil-wealth with a budget of over three million U.S. dollars, and in collaboration with scientists from the University of Arizona, it was envisioned as a model for vegetable self-sufficiency. Yet, less than a decade later, the greenhouses were dismantled and the site repurposed for urban development. At the same time, Sheikh Zayed sought to create new agricultural plots in the desert. He used bulldozers to level the sand dunes, added a layer of clay to the newly created fields, and encircled plots by trees. The simultaneous development of large-scale desalination plants made this expansion possible. According to Heard-Bey (1982, 181) “[a] garden no longer has to be in a hollow right by the best place for a well; it can be established on flat ground at some distance from the dune”. The impact of these initiatives was that the desert was gradually taken over by agricultural farms.
These initiatives and agricultural innovations were less about feeding populations than about asserting sovereignty, displaying modern capability, and consolidating the legitimacy of these new petro-states. The symbolism of the experiment endured; it represented an era when the control of water, soil, and climate became synonymous with national progress and civilization. This ethos was captured in Sheikh Zayed’s oft-cited phrase: “Give me agriculture and I will give you civilization.” Agriculture was not merely an economic activity – it was a civilizational marker, a sign that the nation could overcome its environment and limits through ingenuity and wealth. The idea that oil could purchase agricultural futures had become deeply embedded in Gulf development thinking, and effort to ‘greening the desert’ through technology persisted despite earlier failures.
Contemporary Agricultural Strategies: Food Security, Technology, and Land Grab
By the early 2000s, agricultural production was changing rapidly in the Gulf states. Decades of intensive groundwater extraction had exposed the ecological limits of domestic production: declining groundwater, soil salinization, and rising energy demands. What had once symbolised modernity and self-reliance was increasingly recognised as unsustainable. Yet rather than abandoning their aspirations of local food production, governments across the region were reframing them. Techno-centric agricultural models as well as foreign direct investment (FDI) in agricultural land and agribusiness – justified by food security ambitions – came to dominate policy discourse and guided states and private actors’ interventions.
The 2007–08 global food crisis further sharpened the food security awareness. Rising food prices and export restrictions underscored the region’s vulnerability to global supply shocks. Yet the challenge for these oil rich countries was not their ability to finance food imports or subsidize food prices, but rather their reliance on the international trading market and the risks faced in terms of food access. Food security became a central component of national planning, leading to new institutional frameworks. In the UAE for example, a dedicated Ministry of State for Food Security was created in 2017 following a series of institutional changes that saw the removal of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (established in 1971). The ministry published in 2018 a Nation Food Security Strategy 2051 offering a holistic view of the anticipated future of the agri-food sector. Saudi Arabia and Qatar also launched similar strategic plans focused on a two-pronged approach: boosting domestic production through investments in modern agriculture and technology, and securing international supply chains by investing in overseas farmland and logistics. These visions signalled a growing effort to align food, water, and climate within a unified vision for the future of these countries. Indeed, as Gulf governments were increasingly seeking to diversify their economies away from oil, they embedded agriculture into their long-term economic visions – namely the UAE Centennial Vision 2071, Qatar National Vision 2030, and Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 – reinforcing policy of resilience.
In practice, hydroponics, aeroponics, vertical farms, and AI-based monitoring systems proliferated. These models promise to produce more food using less land, water, and chemicals. Greenhouses capable of operating year-round in desert conditions became symbols of progress and resilience. Yet beneath the sustainability branding lay a paradox: these projects remain energy-intensive and heavily dependent on fossil fuels for desalination, cooling, lighting, ventilation, and irrigation. This is, quite literally, agriculture powered by oil. In other words, the region’s post-oil transition is financed and sustained by the very hydrocarbons it seeks to transcend. By rebranding energy-hungry infrastructure as sustainable, Gulf states perform an act of environmental alchemy – transforming fossil wealth into green modernity. The desert is thus re-imagined once more.
The Gulf’s agricultural ambitions have also expanded beyond their borders, investing in farmland, agribusiness, and logistics networks abroad to secure food imports and extend influence. Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia have financed large-scale farming and acquired extensive land holdings in many geographies. Through these cross-border acquisitions, Gulf states effectively externalise their land and water requirements, transferring the environmental costs of production to countries who often are already under resource stress. The logic is both economic and geopolitical. Land investments guarantee supply chains insulated from global price volatility while deepening diplomatic and trade ties. Yet in host countries, Gulf-funded projects can bring infrastructure and employment, but they also risk exacerbating inequalities. Large tracts of fertile land are leased for export crops, displacing small farmers and diverting scarce water from local food systems. Environmental degradation and social tension often follow. Meanwhile, within the Gulf, these foreign ventures reinforce a narrative of green modernity. Official discourse presents them as responsible investments that contribute to regional food stability. Yet the paradox remains: what appears as sustainability from Doha or Abu Dhabi often translates into ecological pressure and vulnerability elsewhere. The export of the desert farming model thus extends the political ecology of oil beyond national borders, embedding it within a trans-regional web of dependency.
Agriculture in the Arabian Gulf: Oil Power By Other Means
Agriculture in the Arabian Gulf is not simply about growing food in the desert. It is a material expression of oil power. It shows how fossil capitalism enables states to cultivate landscapes that defy ecology, but also how this process creates new dependencies and inequalities. Far from being a response to natural scarcity, agriculture in the Gulf operates as a continuation of oil power by other means. The infrastructures that sustain food production – desalination plants, refrigerated greenhouses, and hydroponic towers – are financed, powered, and legitimised by the same fossil revenues that built the region’s cities. In this sense, agriculture has become an extension of the rentier state: a new stage on which oil wealth performs its capacity to generate life in a place defined by environmental limits. By translating environmental anxiety into investment opportunity, Gulf states transform vulnerability into a platform for geopolitical influence. Agriculture thus functions simultaneously as an economic diversification strategy, a soft-power instrument, and a mechanism for state legitimacy under the banner of sustainability.
This dual logic of dependence and reinvention sustains the appeal of “greening the desert.” Yet beneath its polished surfaces lie uneven ecologies and social costs that extend beyond the Gulf’s borders. Farming the desert, then, is both a miracle and a mirage. It showcases technological brilliance while masking the contradictions of fossil capitalism. When oil wealth is mobilised to cultivate food systems in the desert, it produces agrarian futures that are dazzling to the eye yet ecologically costly and politically unequal. As the world turns toward decarbonisation, the Gulf’s model invites a difficult question: can there be a truly post-oil agriculture within an oil economy?