Desert Turned Farmland in Egypt - Arab Environment Watch

The dream of development in the Arab World is to manage to produce sustainable mechanisms to turn deserts into productive land on the long run without polluting it with pesticides and ending up in irreversible salinization of the land after a few years, let alone water resource depletion.

Experiments are always important to study, and Egypt has emerged in the past few years with some very promising "desert greeinng" methodologies that need time to be assessed for success and sustainability.

The National Geographic has published a description of one of Egypt's endeavoures on its website with some very good images that characterise National Gorgraphic.

This is the text published by National Geographic:

A bird's-eye view shows the farming village of Abu Minqar in Egypt.

The village is one of the extreme examples of the country's plan to ''green'' its deserts and transform the barren areas that consume most of the landscape into productive farms and fields.

Though the policy has been going for decades, it is now achieving large-scale success.

Close to the Libyan border, Abu Minqar is far more remote than majority of desert farmland in Egypt. Its existence is proof that Egypt can set up farms anywhere.

"There is no desert left at all," said Mohsen Nawara, manager of South Tahrir Station, a research farm founded by the Desert Development Center (DDC) of the American University in Cairo. "It's all green now."

We really hope that it will continue to be green and productive