Jordan puts family-run farms at the heart of agricultural transformation

farmers
(File photo: Ameer Khalifeh/Jordan News)
farmers

Ruba Saqr

The writer 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.

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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