Wheat output drops faster than planned
Posted by Arab News
Souhail Karam | Reuters
Wednesday 3 February 2010 (18 Safar 1431)

RIYADH: Saudi farmers are abandoning wheat cultivation faster than the government had anticipated under a plan to save dwindling water resources, Agriculture Minister Fahd Balghunaim said in an interview on Tuesday.

Saudi Arabia became a major buyer of wheat on global markets after starting the phase-out program, to be run over eight years, in September 2008.

“In two years, since we launched the wheat reduction plan, planted area fell 40 percent, which is faster than we had anticipated,” Balghunaim said.

“We were considering an annual drop of 12.5 percent in planted areas,” Balghunaim said, in the first official comment on progress of the output reduction program since its launch.

Saudi Arabia announced in January 2008 that it would cut domestic wheat production by 12.5 percent a year to conserve scarce water supplies and would rely entirely on imports by 2016.

Before this measure was taken, the Kingdom had ensured self-sufficiency for three decades.

“Our wheat production last year fell to about 1 million tons ... Our annual needs stand at about 2.5 million tons of wheat, hard wheat that is,” Balghunaim said. He did not give a comparative figure for the wheat harvest in 2008.

The Saudi wheat harvest in 2009 was lower than the 1.2 million tons the US Department of Agriculture had expected and 1.7 million tons the Kingdom produced in 2008, according to the USDA.

In its first import campaign, the Arab world’s biggest economy imported 2.2 million tons of wheat, the biggest chunk of which was hard wheat of Canadian origins.

Waleed Al-Khariji, who heads the Kingdom’s grains authority (GSFMO), has said Saudi Arabia would import 3 million tons of wheat per year up to 2016.


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