Plastics and Agriculture in the Desert Frontier

In a warming, water-scarce planet, we are hearing again that the future lies in "greening the desert."¹ A sustainable answer to the problem of food insecurity is to be found in turning semi-arid and desert areas into new centers of food production. Facing reignited fears of ecological limits to production under the specter of overpopulation, climate change, and peak oil, we are to be saved by such technical feats as solar-powered irrigation systems with desalinated water, hydroponic methods that grow crops without soil, and plastic mulches, greenhouses, and irrigation tubes.

Greening the desert narratives come at a time of growing public attention to the water crises that have been intensifying in arid and semi-arid regions from industrial agriculture production. Attention in the United States was particularly striking in 2015 as the state of California, the largest horticulture region in the country, if not the world, announced mandatory water restrictions in the face of a four-year drought.² Other examples abound: Facing rapid depletion of fossil aquifers, Saudi Arabia imposed limits on the extraction of groundwater—a restriction that has compelled Saudi investors and agribusinesses to acquire agricultural land in neighboring countries since the 2007–8 food-fuel-financial crises.³ In 2010 the Royal Academy of Engineering produced a report warning that British demand for fresh fruits and vegetables is exacerbating water scarcity in producing countries in the global south.⁴ Greening the desert narratives at a time of multiplying water crises seem contradictory: arid and semi-arid regions that have long been turned into sites of intensive agriculture production are now drying up, and yet these narratives promote the same set of processes that created the present-day crises, just in new lands and with the latest agritechnologies and practices.

Nonetheless, state development agencies and strands of the alternative food movement are promoting agritechnologies and on-farm practices that make greening the desert possible.⁵ Greening the desert narratives have regained traction through explanations of the crises as a management or governance problem—for example, a tragedy of the commons or water-thirsty crops irresponsibly planted in dry lands.⁶ As such, in these narratives the latest technical feats, coupled with proper management, hold the promise of solving the problem of food production in the face of imminent ecological crises as a result of desertification, depleted aquifers, soil salination, and on and on. Through a case study of greening the desert policies and practices in Egypt, I argue that the crises reflect rather than contradict the social and ecological relations of agriculture production in dry regions, and will not be resolved through better management practices or the next technical fix.

Egypt became an agroexporter of fresh fruits and vegetables (and a large-scale producer of industrial poultry) through the expansion of reclaimed lands farther into arid regions—and largely to the west and east of the Delta.⁷ Land reclamation entails making cultivatable or developed for agriculture and food processing (and to a certain extent for human settlement) semidesert and desert lands that were not at all or recently cultivated intensively. The ever-present image of the country's population squeezed into a thin strip of arable land surrounded by a vast desert has long promoted the reclamation of these lands in Egypt. Reclamation has held the promise of expanding the total area of arable land—and permanently, through cultivation and settlement. And as reclaimed lands have expanded, the country's agrifood industry has grown.⁸ The agroexport market (of fruits and vegetables, fresh and processed), which is one node in this formalized economic sector, is relatively small, but like most agroexporting regions is dominated by highly capitalized firms. As with other regions that have begun to face water crises, within just a few years of the country joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) (in 1995) and bilateral and multilateral trade agreements that followed, the water table that irrigates a portion of reclaimed lands to the west of the Delta began dropping rapidly—at a rate of about 1 meter per year.⁹

Egypt can be classified as a New...