Do you think it would be possible to transform the Sahara desert into a big irrigated area for cultivation?

Question

I´m agricultural enginyeer and often ask myself this question. The facts is that we´ve got the technology to send spacecrafts to Mars but we are unable to solve the hungry in our own planet

What is happening?

I think there is something that doesn´t work with us

Do you think it would be possible to transform the Sahara desert into a big irrigated area for cultivation in order to fight against the poverty in África, and, at the same time reduce the CO2 emissions to the atmosphere.

What would be necessary?

Maybe I´m dreaming.......

Regards from Valencia, Spain

Answer 1

The Jewish people invented the drip system for there deserts. But the enviromentalist groups would worry about the desert snakes and bugs being in harm.

Answer 2

Sure, you could do it. There would be two ways:

Using high-tech irrigation pipelines, and huge pumps and desalination plants on the Mediterranean and Atlantic, which would require LOTS of energy - probably of the order that only fossil fuel could currently supply, and this would lead to increase in CO2, and climate change, and probably desertification of other areas (central china, the amazon, etc.).

The other way would be to use permaculture principles to maximise water retention in areas on the edge of the desert, and gradually work your way in. This would take a long time, but if you did it correctly, it might actually take carbon out of the atmosphere, by embedding it in the extra biomass.

But before you do either of those, you should ask yourself why you should do it, and I'd suggest that there's a lot of good reasons not to:

First, there ISN'T a food shortage. Millions of tonnes of food gets wasted every year. Food gets dumped simply to keep prices up.(1)

Even if there was a food shortage, making more food would, by all past evidence, just lead to population increase, and then to another famine somewhere else.

Converting the desert into arable land would wipe out many valuable and fragile eco-systems, from which we could learn much.

Answer 3

yes a part of it to begin with. It was done in Saudi Arabia where many parts of the desert had been converted to agricultural and irrigated area. You can see from a airplane when it takes off the Riyadh International Airport. It's really beautiful like many round green circles.

Answer 4

It's all about money. You can do almost anything if you have enough money.

Answer 5

if were possible, the would rich want a

profit,35% to 50% on there dollar,look at all

money they spent,canpaning the election

all that money could of turn the sahara

desert, into irrgation area ,greed If some does

donate it for a tax write off , most of the time!

emissions are bad in one place raise there

taxes make them clean up, then the company

move to aother place that does care!!!

Answer 6

For the follow up with naught. you will need a huge capital to be able to start that big scale project. and you need some goverment support to pull that plan off. Sorry if I'm wrong or not

Answer 7

In theory, maybe. In practice, no. As an agricutural engineer, you should know about limiting factors. You could provide enough water to a small area to make water non-limiting. The lack of organic material in the soil would then become limiting. Perhaps, if you had complete recycling of garbage and sanitary sewage, you might be able to convert small patches of desert to agricultural production. Your limiting factor in this case would probably be money.

It's an interesting dream, though.

Answer 8

There is a couple reasons why it won't work the way you see it...

For one, the Sahara is already the source of water for Libya - it is covered by pipelines that tap into underwater boreholes sunk 1/3rd mile into the sand

Secondly if you wanted to flood it you would have to get that water from somewhere. The Nile would be your only true viable source, and that would never happen because it's waters power Egypt and are the existing irrigator's primary source of water. If you diverted the water from there, you'd displace hundreds of thousands of people down stream. The water threshold of the Nile is already used up--barely anything reaches the the sea from the Nile river due to how damned up they have it.

Thirdly the land is not suitable for crops. If you don't have good soils you don't have good crops.

There are other reasons not to do it, but I'll leave that to more skilled ecologists/hydrologists...