In August, Arizona’s attorney general asked for an investigation into a 2015 “sweetheart deal” between the Saudi agribusiness company Fondomonte and the Arizona State Land Department. This deal let Fondomonte lease desert farmland west of Phoenix for one-sixth of its market value and pump groundwater from Phoenix’s water reserves. Professor of geography at Syracuse University Natalie Koch, who was born and raised in Arizona and studies the Arabian Peninsula, began looking into the deal in 2018. By doing this, she found out that the deal wasn’t a one-time thing, but was part of a long history of cooperation between Arizona and the Arabian Peninsula. HCN talked to Koch about her new book, Arid Empire, which comes out in January from Verso Books and looks at how the history of the two deserts is linked.
News from High Country:
You start the book by talking about a double exposure, which is a slide with two pictures on it: one of a camel and one of a Coke ad. Why did you think that was a sign of how Arizona and the Arabian Peninsula are connected?
Natalie Koch: A double exposure, which is when two images are mapped on top of each other, is usually a mistake made when a photo is being developed. But the double-exposure photo helped me see both the past and the present at the same time.
When I started this project, I thought it would be about the farm in Arizona that is currently owned by Saudi Arabia. But I kept finding that the stories I was finding kept coming back around. I would start with a question about the present, like the Saudi farm deal, and then go right back to the past. So the double exposure is a way to think about both the past and the present at the same time, to be able to pay attention to both at the same time.
HCN: About the Saudi farm you talk about, there has been a lot of noise in Arizona lately. How did a farm owned by Saudi Arabia get to Arizona?
Fondomonte, the Saudi company that owns the farm, is a branch of Almarai, which is a bigger dairy and farm business. Almarai owns a lot of land outside of Saudi Arabia, which is where most of their grain comes from now. They have a lot of cows in Saudi Arabia, so they need a lot of grain.
A big reason why so many people in Arizona are upset is that the farm grows alfalfa, which needs a lot of water. But Arizona has grown alfalfa for a long time, because in the desert, as long as you have enough water, you can get more than one harvest in a year. So it was appealing to them for the same reason. Fondomonte also owns a farm in Blythe, California, which is not too far from the site near Phoenix.
I kept finding that the stories I was finding kept coming back to themselves.
Arizona also has a deeper historical role. Almarai’s main office is in the middle of Saudi Arabia, not far from Riyadh. Since the 1930s, when King Ibn Saud wanted to grow it, the farming business has been very important there. In 1942, the U.S. government sent a group of farmers from Arizona to share their knowledge about growing alfalfa and all the ways they had learned to get water in Arizona.
Then it came full circle: King Saud and his family went to Arizona on a royal visit. They went on this whole tour of Arizona’s farms and looked at the state’s dairy business. King Saud went back to Saudi Arabia and tried to get a dairy industry started there. What we see now is how that turned out. But that’s not the only way Arizona and the Arabian Peninsula are linked.
HCN:
In your book, you talk about how the Arizona Experiment Station helped people move to Arizona in the past. High Country News has talked about “land-grab universities” in the past. What does the Arabian Peninsula have to do with the University of Arizona and its farming?
The University of Arizona was first thought of in the 1860s, but the territory didn’t have enough money to start it. Then, the regents found out that the 1887 Hatch Act, an addition to the Morrill Act (which made land-grant universities possible), was giving out new federal money to set up university agriculture experiment stations. The regents figured out that they could get $15,000 to set up an agricultural station on paper and use the money to help fund and start the university.
But in the end, they had to make sure that the agricultural station was legal. And the first directors, like the camel promoters, looked to the Middle East and asked, “How do we settle this desert we know nothing about?” What are the most valuable and useful crops in the Middle East? Arizona farmers and boosters had already been putting a lot of attention on fruit production, so they asked farmers around the state what they thought about date farming. So they sent some test date palms to Arizona to see what would happen. The one from Oman was the first. And that led to the University of Arizona’s big investment in farming, which is still going on today. Like the story in the HCN article, the goal was to help Arizona farmers. Not the Native American farmers who had been doing irrigated agriculture in Arizona for hundreds of years, but the white settler farmers who wanted to come to Arizona and be part of the colonisation project.
It’s easy to forget how hard it was for the U.S. government to take control of the parts of the country that are now called Arizona.
HCN: Before these changes in agriculture, Arizona had other connections to the Arabian Peninsula, such as camels. Why are there camels in Arizona?
In the middle of the 1800s, camels were brought to Arizona. When Jefferson Davis was secretary of war, he gave permission for an expedition to go to the Middle East and bring back a lot of different kinds of camels.
It’s easy to forget how hard it was for the U.S. government to take control of the parts of the country that are now called Arizona. The Army and other parts of the government tried to bring these areas into the United States, but they didn’t know how to set up state power in a place with no roads and a harsh environment. So the plan was to bring in a lot of camels that could carry the huge, heavy loads that were needed to set up the military outposts in the Southwest.
Camels were also a big part of biblical stories and the idea of the desert as a biblical place. Even though no one knew them personally, they felt like they knew them because of their religion. This helped establish state power, which was also a project to bring more Christians to the area. So the people who wanted to sell camels and the first people in charge of the experiment station were thinking the same thing: how do we sell a desert we know nothing about? The Middle East was where they thought they should look.
