Saudi farmers abandon wheat production

Saudi farmers are abandoning wheat cultivation faster than the government had anticipated under a plan to save dwindling water resources, the kingdom's Agriculture Minister said in an interview on Tuesday.

Saudi Arabia became a major buyer of wheat on global markets after starting the phase out programme, to be run over eight years, in September 2008.

"In two years, since we launched the wheat reduction plan, planted area fell 40 per cent, which is faster than we had anticipated," Agriculture Minister Fahad Balghunaim told Reuters in an interview.

"We were considering an annual drop of 12.5 per cent in planted areas," Balghunaim said, in the first official comment on progress of the output reduction programme since its launch.

The kingdom announced in January 2008 that it would cut domestic wheat production by 12.5 per cent a year to conserve the desert kingdom's scarce water supplies and would rely entirely on imports by 2016.

Before this measure was taken, the kingdom had ensured self-sufficiency for three decades.

The minister did not comment on what impact the accelerated scaling back of plantings might have on the kingdom's wheat needs for the next few years.

"Our wheat production last year fell to about 1 million tonnes ... Our annual needs stand at about 2.5 million tonnes of wheat, hard wheat that is," Balghunaim said.

He did not give a comparative figure for the wheat harvest in 2008.

The Saudi wheat harvest in 2009 was lower than the 1.2 million tonnes the US Department of Agriculture had expected and 1.7 million tonnes the kingdom produced in 2008, according to the USDA.

In its first import campaign, the Arab world's biggest economy imported 2.2 million tonnes of wheat, the biggest chunk of which was hard wheat of Canadian origins.

Waleed Al Khariji, who heads the kingdom's grains authority (GSFMO), has said that the kingdom would import 3 million tonnes of wheat per year up to 2016.