Grass-roots project to fix Saudi farmers’ problems

The collaboration, between the University of Hail (UH) and the University of Arizona (UA), and spearheaded by UA alumnus and Saudi businessman Turki Al Rashid, aims to develop a “social agriculture​” programme, initially with farmers in Hail province. The project team has selected a pilot village in the province, and hopes to report initial results as early as October.

“The concept of strategic social agriculture is connecting the farmers in the villages to whatever type of innovation they need, be it market innovation, technology innovation, and so on – so that their most significant or urgent need is met. The anticipation here is that, by meeting that particular need, their lives will be significantly improved​,” said Joel Cuello, professor of agriculture and director of the Global Institute for Strategic Agriculture in Dry Lands at UA, and one of the social agriculture project’s architects.

Low-cost, high speed​

“We would like this problem to have a solution that is relatively low-cost, up to about US$50,000 ideally. And we’d like the solution to be implemented in a relatively short period of time – about six months, although this is the thing we are still trying to determine in the pilot scheme, and this will also depend on the specific problem, which will vary from village to village​,” he added.

He suggested the project could potentially be more successful than other interventions in agriculture, thanks to its approach: “What’s different about this is it’s a very grass-roots approach, and I think that the potential power of this is it’s not top-down – it’s going to the farmers, talking to them, and working together with them to come up with a solution to their problems​.”

Cuello said the specific interventions for the pilot had not yet been finalised, but one likely scheme could be a method of linking farmers directly to information from the major agricultural markets in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam, to cut out the middle-man and improve farmers’ market intelligence. Another was a locally-developed method to prevent the red palm weevil – a major threat to date palms​ – from infesting new trees.

“There’s a long-term plan – and this is why we feel this project is very significant. Once we have the prototype village and have implemented the programme – and we expect this to be successful, because we’re meeting the specific needs of the farmers – then the same programme can be implemented in the other villages in Hail, and at the same time in other villages across the kingdom​,” Cuello explained.

Soft diplomacy integration​

Beyond Saudi Arabia, the project’s organisers hope the social agriculture scheme can become part of the kingdom’s “soft diplomacy​” when sending aid to other countries in the Middle East and around the world.

“Based on IMF figures, in the last 40 months Saudi Arabia has given out about US$22.7bn in direct aid to other countries. But the challenge is, the kingdom doesn’t have a feel for how effectively that direct aid is helping the recipient countries. This would be a responsible way, as part of the package deal, by which the kingdom would have a way of measuring how the kingdom’s aid is impacting farmers and residents of other countries​,” said Cuello.