A Case Study of Irrigation in Saudi Arabia in Commemoration of Tony AllaN
Ozymandias is the poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) about the King of Kings, the mighty pharaoh Ramesses II, whose huge statue – and all his other works – was toppled by the sands of time.
In Saudi Arabia, between 1980 and 2018, irrigation consumed around 700 billion cubic metres (BCM) of groundwater – most of it non-renewable. If the aquifers in the Riyadh and Qassim regions had supplied only drinking and household water, some 4.4 BCM could have been saved in 2018 alone; instead, almost 5.2 BCM of virtual water was exported to neighbouring states in that year, capping a trend that started more than twenty years earlier. Between 1984 and 2000, an estimated $100 billion was spent on desert irrigation. At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s desalination plants continue to burn 1.5 million barrels of oil per day, pollute the air, contribute to global heating and discharge brine that kills marine life. This article scrutinises the cost in terms of water, money and environmental damage, how the decision to irrigate the desert was made and whom might have benefited.
Context: Personal
In 1998, after a thirty-year career in banking in New York, London and Riyadh, I became a student again—seeking answers to questions on the cultures, politics, economies, and prospects for reform in Arab countries. I joined SOAS, where it was possible to access focused regional expertise and scholarship. I vividly recall my first meeting with Professor Tony Allan; it was in the SOAS Staff Common Room. Four hours later, we were still discussing how equally water-poor but ideologically different political economies in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia and Syria, pursue unsustainable water policies. I found myself in the presence of a gifted strategic thinker.
Our discussion became the subject of my ‘recreational PhD’ as he used to joke about my status among his students. With gratitude and a sense of infinite debt, I shall always remember the weekly meetings and many hours of engaging discussion with Tony Allan over the past two decades: his clarity of vision, perception and capacity to see the big picture, his integrity, dedication to teaching, sincerity and loyalty were inspirational. He was always the perfect gentleman.
Setting the Stage
Tony Allan taught that food is an encapsulation of water—virtual water. While money measures the value of goods, agricultural production may be expressed in terms of the water needed to plant, grow, harvest, package and ship the produce for consumption. For example, 140 litres of water are embedded in a cup of coffee, 1,000 litres in a litre of milk, 1,300 litres in a kg of wheat, 2,700 litres in a T-shirt, 3,900 litres in a kg of chicken, 15,500 litres in a kg of beef. Coffee, milk, wheat, T-shirt, chicken, and beef are all virtual water. Annually, an individual requires one cubic metre of water for drinking, one hundred cubic metres for domestic chores, and one thousand cubic metres for food.
The global hydrological cycle of continuous evaporation and precipitation supports rain fed vegetation, runoff to rivers and recharge of aquifers. Human intervention, through dams, diversion structures and wells, supplements natural precipitation; 92 per cent of Society’s water consumption goes to produce food. A nation’s water is comprised by so-called blue water, which is abstracted from streams and aquifers and managed in farm irrigation, and the so-called green water, which is rainfall stored in the soil (Allan 2019). In Saudi Arabia, green water is negligible; and without rivers or lakes, all blue water is extracted from aquifers, which, importantly, are hardly being recharged.
Such conditions necessitate that non-renewable groundwater should be used sparingly, and only for the most important societal needs. It should be prioritised for industrial uses and for drinking, and the household needs of future generations. Tony Allan maintained that food imports provide global solutions to local water scarcity challenges; the virtual water in imported food supplements domestic water resources and water-poor countries can most rationally import food beyond what their renewable water resources can produce. To earn the dollars to import water-hungry foodstuffs, a water-poor country needs to export manufactured widgets and gadgets that require little water to produce, or else be endowed with exportable commodities such as crude oil.
This article scrutinises Saudi Arabia’s experiment since the early 1980s to achieve food self-sufficiency, especially in wheat. It updates Chapter Three of my doctoral dissertation, supervised by Professor Allan. The Chapter addresses Saudi Arabia’s quest for food independence (Elhadj 2004a). I shall outline the enormity of the cost in terms of water, followed by a short history of Saudi Arabia’s drive to make the desert bloom. I will guesstimate the financial cost, describe the environmental damage of such folly, examine Riyadh’s imports and exports of virtual water, relate how the decision to irrigate the desert was made and contrast it with a criterion for the efficient allocation of scarce economic resources. I will also consider who might have benefited and explain why Saudi Arabia’s quest for food independence a delusion is.
Depletion of Saudi Aquifers
Over the millennia, aridity constrained both agricultural production and population size in the Arabian Peninsula (except around oases and in parts of the Yemen). In the 1960s and 1970s, the Saudi Ministry of Agriculture and Water (MAW) surveyed groundwater resources in the Saudi Desert; the estimated water volumes from the surveys were quite low. In the early 1980s, two further MAW studies discovered more water than had been imagined and, combined with the steep rise in oil prices in 1973, the desert kingdom embarked upon a grand irrigation adventure to achieve food independence.[2] The centrepiece was wheat self-sufficiency. Riyadh announced its readiness to purchase all the wheat Saudis could grow—at prices that would give growers a handsome return on capital.
Major trading families, with little or no experience in farming, acquired tracts of land in the Central Province, the heart of the desert and home to the ruling House of Saud. From the East and the West, they employed farm managers, engineers, mechanics, labourers, and imported pumps, tractors, harvesters, trucks, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and giant centre-pivot irrigation systems famously seen from the air on the approach to Riyadh and the towns of the Qassim Region.
During the first two decades of the food self-sufficiency strategy, 1980-1999, the desert kingdom extracted 300 BCM of water, equivalent to six years of water flow of the River Nile into Egypt, irrigated 21 million ha and grew 153 million tons of produce.[3] During this period, the average water consumption was over 14,000 cubic metres per ha,[4] and the average annual agricultural water consumption was 15 BCM.4
During the next 19 years, 2000-2018, irrigation extended over 19.2 million ha, producing 203 million tons of crops.[5] Agricultural water consumption data during this period are not available but, if we assume uniform agricultural water consumption during the four decades 1980-2018, it would amount to 700 BCM,[6] an average annual water consumption of 18 BCM.[7] According to MAW, two-thirds of the water was thought to be partially renewable. However, according to Ministry of Planning, the volume of non-renewable water was much greater; the planning ministry uses the term non-renewable to signify what MAW describes as partially renewable (Elhadj 2004a).
Water may be found at depths ranging from 100 metres to 500 m, sometimes as deep as 2,500 m. There are 27 aquifers in the country, of which six: Saq, Wajid, Minjur, Dhruma, Wasia, and Umm ErRadhuma, are considered to be major. Due to the unavailability of mechanical means and money, they remained largely undisturbed until the early 1980s—but continued abstraction at the current level will, sooner or later, deplete the non-renewable groundwater. No one knows with accuracy how much water remains in the aquifers. No one knows whether new sources of water might be found. In one important agricultural area, Wadi ad-Dawasir in the Central Province of the Riyadh region, NASA’s Earth Observatory concluded that the water table has dropped by as much as 6m (20 feet) per year since the 1980s and that the aquifer could be depleted within a few decades (Voiland 2015). From a peak irrigated area of 1.596 million ha in 1993, some 592,000 ha or 37 per cent of the arable, has already turned to dust.
A Short History
Between 1980 and 1992, the Saudi irrigated area increased from 610,000 ha to 1,600 000 ha and wheat production increased 29-fold, to 4.1 million tons (Central Bank 2020, Table1, p2 and Table 2, p11), more than twice what was needed for self-sufficiency of a country of 17 million inhabitants, as well as beyond the storage capacity of the government’s Grain Silos and Flour Mills Organization (2.4 million tons). Pretending to be a land of milk and honey, Saudi Arabia became the world’s sixth-largest wheat exporter (Richards and Waterbury 1998). But not for long. It merely proved that pouring money and water into the sand can make the desert bloom until either the money or the water runs out. In the event, they both ran out.
The cost of the 1991 Gulf War and persistent budget deficits following a serious drop in oil prices after 1986 forced the government to delay payments of $72 billion to contractors and farmers. They were eventually paid, without interest, in medium-term government bonds which the recipients discounted at Saudi banks for cash. Not only local businesses were affected: Boeing, for example, stopped delivery of the first 777 aircraft to government-owned Saudi Airlines until the payments were made. Throughout most of the 1990s, I was a first-hand witness to these events, as Chief Executive Officer of the Arab National Bank, in Riyadh.
The liquidity crunch signalled the beginning of the end of the wheat project. Quickly, government purchases dropped by 75 per cent, from $1.9 billion in 1991 to $480 million in 1996; wheat production decreased by 70 per cent, from 4 million tons in 1991 to 1.2 million tons in 1996; and 476,000 ha of private sector investment in farmland was abandoned between 1993 and 2000 (Elhadj 2004a, p11). Concerned over dwindling water reserves, Riyadh announced, in January 2008, a running down of the wheat program over the next eight years. In 2016, all of Saudi wheat needs (3.6 million tons) were imported (Hallman 2018).
And, yet, agricultural water consumption increased. Abandonment of 476,000 ha growing wheat should have saved around 6.7 BCM of water annually[8] but, instead, the water saved from growing less wheat was used to irrigate lucerne to feed livestock for domestic consumption as well as exports to neighbouring Gulf Cooperation Council states. While the average water usage between 1990 and 1994 was about 12,000 m3/ha, it increased to an average of more than 15,000 m3/ha between 1995 and 1999 because lucerne consumes 2-3 times as much water as wheat (Jenson 1980). By 2016, the government decreed that lucerne was to be phased-out over three years and Saudi al-Mara’i Company, the largest food company in the Middle East, acquired agricultural lands in Argentina, Arizona, and California to grow stockfeed, which is shipped back to Saudi Arabia to feed its herd of 170,000 cattle (Spagat and Batrawy 2016).
The Financial Cost
Saudi wheat was expensive. Between 1984 (when the data became available) and 2000, some $20 billion was spent on buying 40 million tons of domestic wheat, an average of $500 per ton. During the same period, the international market price averaged $120 per ton; had the wheat been imported, the government could have saved $15 billion. Between 1984 and 2000, government and private sector investments were estimated at $84 billion, excluding three cost elements for which data are unavailable: a) government subsidies to the fuel and electricity used to operate farm machinery; b) concessionary borrowing rates of interest from the Saudi Agricultural Bank on around $10 billion; and c) cost of administering the program.
The Opportunity Cost
Irrigation schemes are not the best use of fossil groundwater in the desert—especially if the agricultural production is uneconomic compared with any imported alternatives; better to reserve it for future domestic and industrial use.
The Riyadh and Qassim regions are in the heart of the Arabian Desert. They encompass around 40 per cent of Saudi agricultural land, or 400,000 ha. Despite the fact that these two regions have access to good quality groundwater, desalinated water is piped from the Gulf Coast, 450 km away, climbing 800 m above sea level over the Najd Plateau to reach their 10 million residents (Central Bank 2020, Tab 38). Had the local aquifers in Riyadh and Qassim supplied water to local peoples’ homes and industry (1.25 BCM in 2018) instead of irrigation (5.6 BCM in 2018), only 22 per cent of that water would have been needed.[9]
It is anomalous and hard to justify running down good quality groundwater to irrigate farms in the searing heat of the desert, while local homes and factories are supplied with desalinated water from far-away processing plants. Nationwide, had the local aquifers supplied water to local peoples’ homes and industry, Saudi society would have saved not only the investment and expense of operation and maintenance of desalination plants, but also the investment and expense of operation and maintenance of 8,400 km of pipelines to carry this desalinated water (US-Saudi Business Council 2021). The cost of desalinating and delivering the water is estimated at around $2.00 per cubic metre (Elhadj 2004b).
Saudi Arabia has 33 desalination plants, 8 on the Gulf in the Eastern Province and 25 on the Red Sea. It is the world’s leading producer of desalinated water; in 2019, it produced 1.9 BCM (Central Bank 2020, p31). Desalination is hugely damaging to the environment: Saudi plants use 1.5 million barrels of oil per day, around 15 per cent of Saudi oil production (Ferzly 2018); they pollute the air and contribute to global heating; they discharge brine that kills marine organisms. It is astonishing that this assault on the Earth’s environment continues unabated in the age of global environmental awareness.
The direct cost of Riyadh’s food self-sufficiency adventure and ongoing program of fodder production[10] comprises: a) the extra cost paid by Saudi consumers for domestically produced food as a result of Riyadh’s trade barriers against food imports in order to protect local food producers (US Dept Commerce 2019); b) the costs to Society of the subsidies supporting the program; c) the difference between the cost of supplying local groundwater and the cost of supplying piped desalinated water, including the unquantified environmental damage caused by desalinating 1.9 BCM per annum in terms of consumption of fossil fuels and hyper-salinisation of local coastal areas; d) at some point in the future, the need to desalinate sea water to replace depleted groundwater supplies.
SAUDI VIRTUAL WATER TRADE
– Imports of Virtual Water
Food is virtual water. Importing a ton of wheat instead of growing it at home could generally save about 1,300 m3 of water, more in the desert. Importing a ton of meat could save about 15,500 m3 of water, a lot more in the desert (Allan 2001a). Tony Allan considered water scarcity a local problem and trade in commodities the global solution. He characterized virtual water trade as economically invisible and politically silent, convenient for politicians who prefer to keep food imports secret. Where domestic food production falls short of a country’s requirements, it is better to fill the gap through importing the shortfall from the international markets than to invest in financially non-viable and economically and environmentally damaging local farming schemes.
Saudi Arabia’s food independence strategy failed to achieve its own goals. The contribution of agriculture and fishing to gross domestic product dropped from 4.9 per cent in 2000 to 2.2 per cent in 2018. Fortunately for Saudi Arabia, it has the dollar revenues from oil exports to pay for food imports. In 2018, it paid $4.8 billion for live animals and animal products, $8.8 billion for vegetable products, and $7.8 billion for animal or vegetable fats and oils, prepared foodstuffs, beverages and tobacco, for a total of $21.4 billion (Saudi General Authority for Statistics 2019).
– Export of Virtual Water
Following Tony Allan’s reasoning, food exports are like shipping water away. While Saudi Arabia was spending over $21 billion on food imports in 2018, it was also exporting foodstuffs to neighbouring states. In 2018, exports of live animals and animal products were $1.6 billion. Assuming an average price of $3,000 per ton and 4,500 m3 water to grow a ton of this category of exports, then the embedded water would be around 2.4 BCM. Also, in 2018, Saudi Arabia exported vegetable products, animal or vegetable fats and oils, prepared foodstuffs, beverages and tobacco valued at $2.1 billion. Assuming an average price of $1,500 per ton, and an average of 2,000 m3 of water to grow a ton of products in this basket, then their embedded water would be 2.8 BCM.
The total value of Saudi food exports in 2018, was $3.7 billion, or 17 per cent of the value of food imports. In terms of water, 5.2 BCM was exported, representing almost 30 per cent of the irrigation water consumed that year. Saudi exports of virtual water are not new; between 1997 and 2001, exports to neighbouring GCC city-states of meat, fruits, and vegetables averaged 2.5 BCM annually, exclusive of lucerne exports which stopped in 2000.
How was the Decision to Make the Desert Bloom Taken?
The policy goals of desert farming were economically and environmentally unsustainable. The dramatic rise and equally dramatic fall in cultivated land, wheat production, exports of forage and foodstuffs, and the accompanying supply of desalinated water to cities and villages with relatively easy access to good quality groundwater were an extreme case of a politically determined ecological policy formulated by misguided politicians enjoying rentier economic circumstances. Their strategy lacked both environmental consideration and safe political processes to combine the natural, human, and financial capitals to achieve economic security.
An absolute monarchy, Saudi Arabia’s governance is non-representative and non-participatory, and non-transparent. Foreign suppliers, in this case, agribusiness, desalination and pipeline executives, closely associate themselves with powerful members of the ruling elite. Obscene and illicit commissions generate dubious schemes. Exorbitantly expensive white-elephant projects, like food self-sufficiency in the desert or supplying desalinated water to areas rich in groundwater, were attractively packaged with nationalistic slogans. In the absence of political parties, a free press, environmental groups, or other concerned groups such as egalitarian nongovernmental organizations, it is impossible to introduce a balancing economic or environmental perspective into water policy. Consequently, there has been no effective dissent against desert farming. On the contrary, the government and its defenders at home and apologists abroad have praised this folly as a judicious and patriotic strategy.
Once the wrong strategy is in place, it becomes progressively more difficult to reverse. Tactical decisions to make a wrong strategy less damaging, like raising the operational efficiency of irrigation, or shifting emphasis from one crop to another, will not correct the original flawed decision—modifying a wrong strategy is like slowing down on a road, while still going in the wrong direction.
A Criterion for Efficient Allocation of Scarce Resources
Investment in irrigation and land reclamation should be justified on a purely economic basis, with full costing of water and accounting for the negative and positive externalities of production and consumption. Tony Allan advocated proper valuation of water and environmental protection and devoted Chapters Three and Four in his book, The Middle East Water Question (Allan 2001b), to this controversial and sensitive subject. His approach makes water extraction and delivery a central factor in the cost of production. Accounting for water would raise the price consumers pay for red meat, for example. Higher red meat prices would reduce the demand for beef, reduce the planet’s herd of some 1.4 billion cows (Borunda 2019), reduce dangerous methane emissions, and mitigate global heating. Concerned over the environment, Tony Allan became a vegetarian. But he was also a realist; he accepted that proper accounting for water would be a major departure from attitudes developed over centuries when poverty and age-old customary practices expected water to be free of charge.
Had Riyadh applied a rate-of-return-on-investment criterion in allocating its scarce economic resources, desert irrigation would never have been pursued. But in Riyadh, as in many other capitals, public policy is dominated by political convenience, not science. There is a profound difference between economics and political economy, statistics and political statistics, investment theory and political investments, accounting theory and political accounting. In the last two years, we have seen comparable differences between Covid-19 science and Covid-19 politics, face-mask science and face-mask politics, vaccine science and vaccine politics. In public policy, theory is utopia, science is truth while politics is Machiavellian. As Marc Reisner asserts in Cadillac Desert (Reizner 1993): ‘water flows uphill toward money’. In short, political economy considerations explain bad public policy decisions.
Whom Might Have Benefited from Desert Agriculture?
Why did Saudi Arabia pursue desert agriculture? Was it for food independence, or enrichment of the ruling group?
– Food Independence
In reaction to calls in certain US media that Washington should impose a food boycott on Saudi Arabia in retaliation for its oil embargo on the United States and the quadrupling of oil prices during the 1973 Arab Israeli war, Saudi Arabia promoted the notion that wheat independence was necessary to protect the economy and national security from foreign pressure. This allegation does not stand scrutiny:
First, had Riyadh taken the American threat seriously, it would not have waited seven years to react. In an absolute monarchy, decisions can be made quickly. The king controls the three branches of government and the fourth estate; his wish is law.
Secondly, food self-sufficiency does not provide political or economic security. Washington possesses many weapons other than food boycotts, such as, removing military protection of Riyadh, or boycott of Saudi banks and the many essentials Saudi Arabia imports, from weapon systems and spare parts to oil drilling and related equipment, construction machinery, pharmaceuticals, etc.
Thirdly, Saudi food independence is impossible to achieve. High population growth rates with finite water resources will eventually deplete non-renewable aquifers.
– Enriching the Ruling Group
The Saudi ruling elite is composed of four groups. In return for benefits and privilege, they support the five generations of the more than 10,000 direct descendants of King Abdulaziz. These elites are the Islamic ulama, military leaders, tribal chiefs, and major merchant families. The ulama lend the ruling family religious legitimacy by threatening the populace with hell’s fire if they ignore Quranic and Hadith injunctions to obey the monarch blindly. The military class defends the regime against domestic dissent. The tribal leaders and major merchant families control the rank-and-file tribesmen and employees of the private sector. In a country of 13 million expatriate workers out of a total population of around 34 million (Central Bank Yearly Statistics 2020), such a societal construction provides strong protection to an absolute system of governance. Furthermore, there are no political parties, labour unions, civil society organizations, student and women associations, social clubs, let alone a parliament.
Saudi Arabia’s agricultural strategy benefited the ruling group. The pioneers of desert agriculture were traders, not farmers. Without their participation, the strategy would not have materialized. The promise of quick and high financial returns enticed some of the country’s richest business families to add farming to their investment portfolios. Businessmen from the Riyadh and Qassim regions, home to the al-Sauds, dominated the scene. They brought in the necessary men and materiel, and enjoyed high returns on investment until the government was forced to abandon the dream of wheat independence in 2008.
The leading trading families are also the exporters of food. In 2018, one third of Saudi Arabia’s $3.7 billion in virtual water exports were carried out by al-Mara’i company (Al-Mara’i 2018). Ownership of the publicly traded stocks of al-Mara’i is concentrated in a few hands—23.7 percent is owned by a member of the ruling family, with a small number of leading businessmen owning substantial shareholding in the company. In its 2014 Annual Report, the company disclosed that 31 shareholders owned 87 per cent of the issued shares (Al-Maria 2014); the 2015 Annual Report disclosed that 33 shareholders owned 88 per cent of the issued shares (Al-Maria 2015); the disclosure has been removed from subsequent annual reports.
The history of the food self-sufficiency strategy since the rise in oil prices of 1973, almost fifty years ago, suggests that the main beneficiaries of the food independence strategy have been the powerful men of the ruling group. Three facts attest to this: the strategy had to wait seven years to emerge; it produced, in the early 1990s, more than twice the volume of wheat needed for self-sufficiency; and the government continues to allow Saudi food companies to export one third of the country’s annual agricultural water to neighbouring states. Food independence was merely a politically convenient slogan to rally the populace behind an imagined national security threat.
The Illusory Quest for Food Independence
It is impossible to attain food independence in the desert kingdom. Saudi renewable water resources are insufficient to feed the burgeoning population. Given that an individual needs 1,000 m3 of water annually for his/her food needs, a population of 35 million (in 2020), needs roughly 35 BCM of water. At present, Saudi Arabia abstracts around 50 per cent of the water needed to feed itself and imports the other 50 per cent. As the size of the population grows, so must food imports.
If you live in a desert, water in the desert is more valuable than water elsewhere. As non-renewable groundwater is depleted, desert agriculture will be abandoned. Its legacy will be the same as that of Ozymandias. Future Saudi generations will tell the story of rulers who squandered gargantuan volumes of non-renewable water—simply because they could.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article was published in Water International Journal, Volume 47, 2022, Issue 6.
I am grateful to my friends Chris Perry and David Dent for reviewing the paper. I benefited from their expert comments, but I assume full responsibility for the contents.
REFERENCES
Allan JA 2001: Virtual Water – economically invisible and politically silent – A way to solve strategic water problems. International Water & Irrigation Journal 21, 4. PP. 29-32
Allan JA 2001b The Middle East water question. Hydropolitics and the global economy, London: IB Taurus, pp. 111-197
Allan JA 2019.Policy note: invited opinion interview: ‘Water scarcity, food production and virtual water. Professor Allan was interviewed in 2019 by Professor Dale Wittington and Dr Duncan Thomas for University of Manchester’s Coursera: https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S2382624X19710036
Al-Mara’i 2014 Annual Report https://www.almarai.com/en/corporate/investors/annual-report-financial-statement/#annual-reports, p 38
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Al-Mara’i 2018 Annual Report, pp2 & 5, 78 & 253
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FOOTNOTES
[1] This article was published in Water International Journal on October 17, 2002, to commemorate Professor Tony Allan of School of Oriental and African Studie (SOAS) and King’s College. Professor Allan was this author’s Ph.D. Supervisor between 2003 and 2006. Professor Allan passed away on April 15, 2022, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02508060.2022.2123612
[2] Between 1968 and 1973, the average price for crude oil was $3.64 per barrel. Between 1974 and 1980, the price jumped to $19.53 per barrel (InflationData.com 2021)
[3] Central Bank Yearly Statistics (2020) Table 19 Cultivated area size and Table 20 Agricultural production. https://www.sama.gov.sa/en-US/EconomicReports/Pages/YearlyStatistics.aspx
[4] Ibid Tables 19 and 20
[5] 300 BCM/20 years = 15 BCM per annum
[6] Since 153 million tons of produce between 1980 and 1999 consumed 300 BCM water, then 203 million tons of produce between 2000 and 2018 could have consumed 398 BCM (300 BCM / 153 million tons = 1,960 m3 per ton x 203 million tons = 398 BCM) and the total water extraction for the 39 years, 698 BCM (300 BCM + 398 BCM = 698 BCM), say 700 billion BCM
[7] 698 BCM/39 years = 17.9 BCM; say 18 BCM
[8] Assuming that a hectare of wheat uses a similar volume of water as the rest of the cultivated area (476,000 ha x 14,000 m3/ha = 6.7 BCM). In 1992, cereals occupied 72% of the cultivated area and wheat production was 88% of all-cereal production (Elhadj 2004a Table 1, p 2 and Table 2 p11)
[9] In 2018, the Saudi cultivated area was 1.004 million ha and the Riyadh and Qassim regions comprised 40% i.e. around 400,000 ha. With an average annual water use of 14,000 m3/ha, the two regions’ use of irrigation water would have been around 5.6 BCM. In 2018, Riyadh’s use of drinking and household water was 1.08 BCM and Qassim’s was 167,000 m3, for a total of about 1.25 BCM (Saudi General Authority for Statistics 2019)
[10] In 2018, total agricultural production was 14,905 million tons—fodder 9,134 million tons, fruits 2,311 million tons, vegetables 1,748 million tons, and grain 1,440 million tons (Central Bank 2020, Table 20)