Saudi Arabia is teaming up with a Dutch greenhouse company to create “a synthetic climate” to make the desert bloom.
It is carving out an area the size of 15 soccer pitches to form a horticulture oasis on the outskirts of Neom, an entirely new city being built on the Red Sea coast that extends out into the desert. The commitment marks the biggest foodtech investment for a nation whose largely arid landscape and extreme summer temperatures have long left it reliant on imports to supply most food.
The project is just the start, said Dutch horticulturist Van der Hoeven, whose US$120 million contract with the Saudi Arabian government entails design and construction of two test facilities on Neom’s outskirts, along with their service and operation over multiple years.
“We are building a synthetic climate where outdoor growing is difficult,” with a goal for plants to yield produce year-round, Van der Hoeven chief executive officer Michiel Schoenmaeckers said in an interview in Amsterdam.
Food security is a priority for the planners of Neom, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s US$500 billion showpiece project to turn an expanse of desert the size of Belgium into a high-tech region that might eventually host millions of people.
The urgency has only grown since the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed the fragility of supply chains and highlighted the risks to food security in the Middle East.
Among the more recent deals, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund signed a pact with US-based AeroFarms to establish a company in Riyadh to build and operate indoor vertical farms in the kingdom and the wider region.
Another Saudi Arabian state entity committed capital last month to a share offering by Brazil’s biggest poultry producer, adding to purchases of stakes in companies from Singapore-based agricultural trader Olam Agri Holdings to Indian rice producer LT Foods Ltd.
In Neom, Saudi Arabia is seeking out the expertise of specialists from the Netherlands, which has become the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter after the US, despite being one of Europe’s smallest nations. Its sway has grown thanks to innovative solutions such as advanced greenhouses and vertical farming, with half the nation’s land allocated for agricultural production.
Apart from meeting the needs of the new city, the goal is eventually to turn the fledgling facilities into a regional food hub.
It would feed both the future metropolis and the rest of Saudi Arabia, while setting an example for other nations that are grappling with food security amid climate change, Neom Food chief executive officer Juan Carlos Motamayor said.
The project is to expand significantly after the two pilot greenhouses are ready, Motamayor said in a separate interview in the Dutch capital.
Construction started earlier this year and the plan is for the test facilities to be completed by next year.
“We will scale up to hundreds of hectares with different types of greenhouses,” Motamayor said.
Neom needs more than 1,000 hectares of greenhouses to deliver on its goal of producing more than 300,000 tonnes of fruits and vegetables, a target it is trying to reach in the next eight to 10 years.
The Dutch company, which is combining a slew of the latest horticulture technologies — including artificial intelligence-driven crop growing and advanced water filtration systems — aims to start operating the first site as early as August next year.
In one location, a novel solar and seawater-driven cooling system is being introduced to operate the greenhouse throughout the extreme summer heat. The approach would significantly lower water usage from the local grid.
On another site, a quarantine greenhouse is to be constructed for introducing perennial crops to Neom.
The choice of Neom is emblematic of efforts by the Saudi Arabian crown prince to wean the US$1 trillion economy off its reliance on oil and turn the city into a testbed for technologies that could revolutionize daily life.
Yet bringing Neom out of the planning phase and into reality has been a challenge. It has not managed to attract much foreign investment so far, and has been hit by setbacks and delays in efforts to build a city with hardly any existing infrastructure and often based on technologies never used before.
“There is no other place in the world that is trying to develop at the scale we want to develop and implement agriculture for arid conditions,” Motamayor said.
Cagan Koc is the Bloomberg News Amsterdam bureau chief.
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