Last Thursday, His Majesty King Abdullah launched a new initiative to
allocate 9,000 dunums (9 square kilometers) of agriculturally promising land to
families residing in the Badia region, a step that puts Jordan on a
new track of agricultural transformation based on a people-centric approach.
اضافة اعلان
Accompanied by
HRH Crown Prince Hussein, King Abdullah also visited the “Oheida” agricultural
station in the Badia, where he underlined the importance of training
the local community on the latest agri-technologies to ration water consumption
and utilize solar energy, in a bid to reduce the agricultural sector’s water
and energy bills and overall carbon footprint.
The Oheida
station, one of 16 agricultural stations in Jordan, has so far trained 86
residents from the southern region on a host of environmentally friendly
agricultural techniques. With the recent allocation of land for agricultural
use, these trainees have been given the opportunity to put their newly acquired
skills to good use by helping their families and the local communities pioneer
an ambitious scheme to rebuild Jordan’s eroded rural communities.
The land area
for this exciting pilot project is around 4.5 times the size of Monaco, on the
French Riviera, and more than twice the size of Ayla, a leading waterfront
resort on the shores of Aqaba, in the south.
With this,
Jordan has essentially taken the very first steps to expand its overall
agricultural land earmarked for agricultural crops and animal husbandry, beyond
its current 2.7 million dunums, which, sadly, form a mere 3 percent of the
Kingdom’s overall land area of 89 million dumums, excluding the Dead Sea.
In 2020, a few
months into the pandemic, King Abdullah addressed the government on the need to
shift national priorities to make agricultural sustainability and food security
a top national concern, in hopes of increasing Jordan’s resilience through
self-reliance.
As a result,
Jordan started mulling over the transformation of a further 10 percent of the
Kingdom’s overall land for agricultural use, an additional 9 million dunums of
arable land that receives an annual rainfall of more than 200 millimeters.
Incidentally,
the total area of arable land in the country stands at around 52 million dunums,
more than half of the Kingdom’s size. But to start agricultural activity across
all of Jordan’s arable areas is a bit of a challenge at the moment, since the
bulk of these areas receive a meagre rainfall of less than 150 millimeters
annually, requiring them to depend on reliable irrigation-based water resources
other than rain.
The good news is
that this will not always be the case for Jordan’s future generations. Over the
long term, growing the natural vegetation cover through agriculture and tree-planting
to increase forest areas promises to help increase the annual rainfall rates
for Jordan.
Family-run agriculture can increase social cohesion, lower the rates of crime (including domestic violence), and promote positive social values that could ultimately increase Jordan’s resilience and internal solidarity.
Recent
scientific papers show that at least 40 percent of all rainfall over
terrestrial areas originates from the transpiration and evaporation caused by
local trees and plants. In other words, more agriculture means more rain in the
long run. This challenges the common belief held by the local farming
community, as well as the media, that agricultural activity depletes water
resources and needs to be avoided to ration water. By contrast, an older
generation of farmers always held the intuitive belief that agriculture
increases the chances of rain.
Putting “people
first” in its agricultural vision testifies to Jordan’s ability to navigate
international trends with wisdom and mindfulness, especially as some of these
trends are driven by some of the world’s richest individuals and corporations.
Roughly, the
planet’s 1 percent controls around 50 percent of the world’s wealth, simply
because they have the monetary resources to influence global policies,
including agricultural ones, to their advantage using lobbying “think tanks”
and venues, such as the World Economic Forum (WEF).
In a reversal of
bad advice from the WEF — that would rather see robots and artificial intelligence
take over the global agricultural sector, as discussed in this year’s edition
of the event — Jordan seems to be taking a human-centric approach to its
agricultural transformation.
This means the
country’s new agricultural policies are in tune with the values of
organizations that do not ascribe to the ideals of globalization in their
traditional sense, such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development,
a Rome-based UN agency dedicated to eradicating poverty in rural areas of
developing countries, and the International Land Coalition, a global alliance
of over 300 civil society and intergovernmental organizations from different
parts of the world.
Interestingly,
Jordan’s position on pre-pandemic globalization attitudes was made clear in rare
statements earlier this week by one of its top officials. In a meeting in
Washington DC, Finance Minister Mohamad Al-Ississ called on the International
Monetary Fund to introduce structural reforms to its system so as to meet the
needs of middle-income countries, such as Jordan. He said that the policies of
global financial institutions have so far leaned toward big companies and major
countries, creating a rift in wealth and opportunity for the rest of the world.
Jordan’s
holistic vision for agriculture is bent on solving more than one problem at the
same time. Encouraging families to turn to agriculture in the southern region
is an important step that could increase the number of Jordanians working in
the agricultural sector through a socially equitable framework. This not only
promises to create new employment opportunities for marginalized communities,
but would also give Jordan’s future farmers a sense of stability as they
venture into new adventures with other members of their families.
The social gains
of this approach are not to be underestimated either. Family-run agriculture
can increase social cohesion, lower the rates of crime (including domestic
violence), and promote positive social values that could ultimately increase
Jordan’s resilience and internal solidarity. Notably, those values are the
farthest from the minds of economic theorists who dominate the world stage and
want to push for agendas that exclude the human element.
That is why it
is refreshing to see that the Jordanian leadership is putting the country’s
local communities front and center of the country’s food systems and
agricultural transformation.
Ruba Saqr has
reported on the environment, worked in the public sector as a communications
officer, and served as managing editor of a business magazine, spokesperson for
a humanitarian INGO, and as head of a PR agency.
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