Here are two interesting pieces from the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC) for whom I do occasional, paid book reviews. The pieces appear in the current, Spring 2010 edition of the MEPC Journal.

The first, by former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles (Chas) Freeman, picks up on a phrase that drove US diplomats crazy: ‘Progress without Change’. This was a trope offered by Saudis that suggested that it was possible to modernize Saudi Arabia without any change in the social or governmental status quo. The concept was risible on its face, but one that many Saudis firmly believed… or at least hoped for. As Freeman points out, with the ascension of King Abdullah to the throne, the notion has been laid aside. Hopefully, it’s being relegated to the dustbin of history once and for all.

Saudi Arabia: The End of Progress without Change
Amb. Charles Freeman

I have been asked to speak to you about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This is a topic I have never before addressed to an American audience. Why bother?

We Americans reserve the right to have strong opinions on the basis of little or no knowledge. There are few countries that better exemplify our assertive ignorance of foreign geography, history, and culture than Saudi Arabia. Most of us are convinced that Saudis are Muslim zealots, control the world’s oil prices, and are absurdly rich, anti-feminist, and undemocratic. They hate our values and want to destroy us. Talk radio confirms this. What more needs to be said?

On reflection, a lot does. Neither caricature nor a priori reasoning is a sound basis for policy. A distorted view of foreign realities precludes success at dealing with them. There is much at stake in our relationship with Saudi Arabia. We can ill afford to get it wrong.

That country is, of course, the heartland of Islam and the custodian of the world’s largest oil reserves. It lies athwart transport routes between Asia, Europe, and Africa. It is at the center of a growing concentration of global capital. Under any circumstances, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would be important. It is all the more so in an era when we Americans are at war with ever more peoples in the Islamic world, depend on ever greater amounts of imported energy, and need ever larger foreign loans to run our government and sustain our life style.
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The second is the start of an article on Saudi Arabia’s quest for food security. It’s by Thomas Lippman, author of the commendable Inside the Mirage, a contemporary history of the Kingdom, and Arabian Knight, a biography of Col. William Eddy, who plaid an important role in early US-Saudi relations.

Unfortunately, the full article is only available to Journal subscribers at this time.

Saudi Arabia’s Quest for “Food Security”
Thomas Lippman

On the broad highway that runs southeast from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, it takes less than an hour to reach the beginning of farm country.

The industrial zones peter out, and suddenly date palms are growing on both sides of the road, not in the random patterns of an oasis but in the long straight rows of cultivated orchards. Then the first chicken hatchery appears, and soon patches of green vegetables and alfalfa. East of the farm town of al-Kharj are vast operations of corporate agriculture, such as Al Safi, the world’s largest dairy farm, and Almarai, a dairy and juice conglomerate.

The landscape is unmistakably desert and hardly looks promising for farming. But agriculture is big business in Saudi Arabia, from Hail in the north to the valleys near Taif in the west to the terraced hillsides of the southwest, made possible mostly by decades of government subsidies and irrigation with water pumped out of caverns deep underground. In 2008, agriculture accounted for nearly 5 percent of the country’s annual GDP and employed about 12 percent of the work force.1

Saudi state television’s “This is Our Country” program features a documentary celebrating the achievements of Saudi agriculture: self-sufficiency in wheat and poultry, impressive harvests of figs, grapes and citrus fruits, increasing production of olive oil. The so-called “Desert Kingdom” is self-sufficient in potatoes — which is saying a lot, given the amount of french fries consumed at the ubiquitous fast-food restaurants — and even produces flowers for export.

Nevertheless, only about 2 percent of the country’s enormous land mass is arable, even with intensive irrigation and modern farming technology, and the country in modern times has always depended on imported food.
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