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Desert farming and the entangled fate of water in Arizona and Arabia
In 2014, the Saudi dairy company Almarai purchased a farm near Vicksburg, Arizona to grow alfalfa as feed for its herd of 93,000 milk cows in Saudi Arabia. Dairy and alfalfa farms both require an immense amount of water to maintain, so what explains these developments in the deserts of Arizona and Arabia? The answers are historical and contemporary. This talk first shows how Almarai’s purchase of the Vicksburg farm is part of a broader history of exchanges between Saudi Arabia and Arizona dating to the early 1940s, when several Saudi royal family visitors came to tour Arizona farming and irrigation networks, and when a team of Arizona farmers was sent to Saudi Arabia to
help build the Kingdom’s first experimental farm at Al Kharj. Al Kharj is also the
headquarters of Almarai – now the largest dairy company in the Middle East and owner of the Vicksburg farm. The talk explains how the dairy industry arose in Saudi Arabia, how commercial agriculture policies set in motion at Al Kharj led to the complete depletion of Saudi Arabia’s aquifers, what led the Saudis back to Arizona in 2014, and what lessons the case offers for understanding the environmental and political impacts of desert farming and water use in Arizona today.
Speaker: Natalie Koch
Natalie Koch is Associate Professor of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She is a political geographer working on geopolitics, energy and the environment, and political theory. Her research focuses on the Arabian Peninsula and she is currently writing a new book on Gulf-Arizona connections, Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia. She is also the author of The Geopolitics of Spectacle: Space, Synecdoche, and the New Capitals of Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).
Hosted by the Sierra Club. More info & register here.