Found this when googling 'alfalfa "china, japan, and the middle east"'
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/20 ... ater-woes/Quote:
People don’t eat much alfalfa, at least not directly.
But the crop widely grown throughout California and the West to feed cows across the world has become central to discussions about managing a future with limited water.
That’s part of the larger debate over what’s being grown and where it goes, and even what people should eat to ease pressure on the water supply and fight climate change.
There’s some foreign intrigue about water-intensive crops like alfalfa going overseas to places like China, Japan and the Middle East. In Arizona, an apparent sweetheart land deal with cheap water that benefits a Saudi-owned farming operation is drawing increasing scrutiny.
But before making foreigners scapegoats for Western water woes, it’s important to remember that much of U.S. agriculture has long cultivated a worldwide market. That’s not going to change, nor should it, for economic and global food-security reasons. Further, climate change and ignoring the reality of less water for too long are bigger culprits.
. . .
Some Arizonans no doubt would like to see that happen on land farmed by private companies that get water at little cost, including a large Saudi Arabian dairy company, Almarai.
The Arizona Republic published a report showing that the Arizona State Land Department has been leasing 3,500 acres of public land and the water that comes with it to Almarai for what appears to be a low price. The farm operation grows alfalfa, which is shipped out for dairy cows in Saudi Arabia.
With groundwater being depleted, particularly by industrial farms, there are growing calls for investigations of the Almarai deal.
Yet most of the big corporate farms in Arizona are U.S.-owned, according to Natalie Koch, a Syracuse University professor and author of the book “Arid Empire: The entangled fates of Arizona and Arabia.”
Koch said in a New York Times column that Arizona should put a stop to Almarai’s “shady deal,” but stressed that what the state really needs to do is reform its lax groundwater laws.
There’s some irony in what at least one politician has called the “Saudi water grab.”
In the 1940s, the U.S. State Department sent Arizona farmers to Saudi Arabia and coordinated two Saudi royal visits to Arizona to tout the state’s desert agriculture, according to Koch.
“The unsustainable alfalfa and dairy enterprise that Saudi Arabia set up in the wake of these visits drained the kingdom’s groundwater, sowing the seeds for Saudi companies to look to Arizona for cheap water,” Koch wrote.
In many respects, this was a problem made in the USA.
I know we're getting off topic here, but that's interesting. The Saudis never stop screwing us, do they.
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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