Speakers Fahad Al-Attiya: Food security expert

Fahad Al-Attiya

Fahad Al-Attiya's job is to maintain food security in Qatar, a country that has no water and imports 90 percent of its food.

Why you should listen to him:

Fahad Bin Mohammed Al-Attiya has his work cut out for him: His home, Qatar, has found itself a newly oil-rich country with an economy growing at an average rate of 15 percent a year, with a rapidly expanding population. That burst in population has been accompanied by a huge surge in water consumption. So what's so strange about that? -- Qatar has virtually no water. In comparison to Brazil's annual 1782 mm of rain, Qatar's annual rainfall is 74 mm.

Al-Attiya is the Chairman of Qatar’s National Food Security Programme, and he is tasked with making food secure -- and keeping it that way -- in a place that has no water and imports 90 percent of its food. He hopes that his program's innovations in sustainable agriculture, especially in arid regions, can help other countries deal with dwindling food supplies due to extreme climate change.

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Quotes by Fahad Al-Attiya

  • “This is the situation in Qatar: … We only have two days of water reserve, we import 90 percent of our food, and we only cultivate less than one percent of our land.”

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