here is nothing new about ICARDA's involvement in the Arabian Peninsula. The Arabian Peninsula Regional Program (APRP) began in 1989 and, in its initial phase, operated for about seven years from ICARDA's headquarters in Aleppo. It concentrated mainly on institutional strengthening.
        Phase II, however, will be different. For a start, it will be run out of the region itself. This has been made possible through the enthusiastic support of the United Arab Emirates, whose Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries,  H.E. Saied Al-Raqabani, has backed us from the start. As a result, in January 1997 ICARDA formally opened the APRP office in Dubai. APRP is financially supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development (AFESD).
        APRP Phase II will have to be at the cutting edge of dry-area agriculture technology. To decide what the priorities should be, a group of distinguished senior scientists from the region, and representatives of AFESD and IFAD, arrived at ICARDA headquarters in early March 1997 to get Phase II off the ground. The scientists from the UAE, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the Sultanate of Oman and the Republic of Yemen attended the Regional Technical

        Other priority research areas picked out by the delegates included the need to develop databases on the state of research in each of the four main themes. Scientists in the national programs and at ICARDA will develop a questionnaire to help collect the data. Collaboration on production of these databases will be sought with the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR), another CG Center, based in The Hague.
        While these themes are pursued, the APRP partners intend to develop other projects for the future. These will include one on citrus, which will be centered on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia but will benefit the region as a whole. And, although there is already a strong water-use efficiency element in the plan, research will be developed for water harvesting and supplemental irrigation in the rainfed areas of the Arabian Peninsula.
        The author was able to see the relevance of all these research themes for himself during a long trip around the region in the autumn. For example, the economics of structures used in protected agriculture are illustrated by installations such as the Arab Qatar Agricultural Project at Al Shaheniyah, Qatar. Built originally with cooperation from The Netherlands and The Arab Organization for Agricultural Development (AOAD), it is a success, producing cucumbers, tomatoes and flowers. Water source is through desalinization using reverse osmosis; the standard of management needs to be high, and the gap between profit and loss is narrow. There are three basic designs of structure--fully-ventilated plastic houses, fully ventilated with a glass roof and non-ventilated with a roof of aluminium strips. The first two designs work well, but the third gets too hot.
        This Qatari experience needs to be spread around the region if the economics of protected agriculture are to be understood. Otherwise, high investment in protected agriculture could be lost. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the protected-agriculture industry has shrunk drastically over the last two years due to economic and marketing issues and a build-up of nematodes. One of APRP's tasks will be to coordinate the practical research needed to ensure that this does not happen throughout the region.
        While in Saudi Arabia, the author was interested to find how the Kingdom is actively looking at the whole issue of water-use efficiency. It is not only through forages that Saudi Arabia has been exporting its precious water; it was also doing so with wheat. This is now being stopped. The Kingdom's Government is also having a re-think on central pivot systems for irrigation, as it regards them as inefficient. Also, working with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Ministry of Agriculture has produced guidelines to the irrigation requirements of the Kingdom's major crops, and a crop-growth model which could be a reference for the design and operation of efficient irrigation systems in the Arabian Peninsula.
        Any technology which leads to more efficient water use in the region is welcome; it is not just an issue of scarcity, but of soil salinity. Salt content varies widely, but is often high; for example, 3-12,000 parts per million (ppm) is Bahrain and 6-10,000 ppm in Kuwait. There is potential here for using salt-tolerant crops--barley, for example, can cope with up to 10,000 ppm, and there could be further development of shrubs for grazing (an area in which ICARDA is very active--see Shrubs could save the steppe in Caravan No.3).
        Other work in hand in Saudi Arabia which is likely to be useful in the rest of the region is on rangeland conservation. Over 70% of the country's land area is so classified. Grazing is a traditional way of life. In recent years the Government has become increasingly concerned over damage being done through overstocking, and is treating conservation and rehabilitation as major issues. Its Department of Range and Animal Development now has a number of substations which are in effect protected, and on which effective land management and rehabilitation are being demonstrated.
        Date palm is important in the region. A Date Palm network has already been set up at the King Faisal University in Al-Hofuf, where there is a research center specifically for this crop. Date palm is vulnerable to pests and diseases, but it is encouraging to find countries in the region working on Integrated Pest Management (IPM) instead of chemical control; indeed Oman has now banned importation of chemicals that are no longer legal in countries like the USA. Both Oman and Yemen are researching indigenous techniques for pest control; in the latter country, for instance, there is a farmer's method of getting ants to eat the larvae of the Lesser Date Moth.
        It will be APRP's task to coordinate  research on the four main themes in order to reduce duplication, and to ensure complementarity (e.g. the country best equipped to tackle a particular subject can do so, and share its experience). It will also ensure that ICARDA's research and germplasm is accessible and relevant to the countries of the region. (It is good to report that crop lines from ICARDA and other CG Centers, for example ICRISAT and CIMMYT,  are already playing a role.)
        It will be a fascinating task. In Oman the author, in the company of hospitable colleagues, drove some 2,000 metres up Jebel Akhdar and was delighted by the steep slopes, date gardens, and small farms with a thriving honey industry (and a superb product).The journey finished  at a spectacular fort with a natural spring and near-boiling water. This is a diverse region. To be sure, much of it is extremely harsh. But that in itself is part of the challenge.
       ICARDA is looking forward to meeting that challenge.

Dr John Peacock is Regional Coordinator of ICARDA's Arabian Peninsula Regional Program, based in Dubai.

Coordination and Regional Steering Committee Meeting of the APRP, which took place from 1 to 4 March. They were joined by donor representatives Dr Abdelmajid Slama (IFAD) and Mr Samir Jarrad (AFESD).
        Each delegation gave presentations on the technology available and required in four areas. These were rangeland, shrubs, irrigated forages/livestock, protected agriculture, and abiotic stresses, on-farm water use and irrigation management. Predictably, water loomed large in the final conclusions.
        There is a strong link there with forages, according to the Saudi Arabian representative, Mr Abdulkarim Bin Mohamed El-Ghamdi. Mr El-Ghamdi, who is Director General of the Agricultural Research Department of the Kingdom's Ministry of Agriculture and Water, commented that he was concerned that by producing irrigated alfalfa that then leaves the country, Saudi Arabia was actually exporting water. He believes that supplemental irrigation of grasses instead would be more water-use efficient in the Kingdom.
        These concerns were reflected in the conclusions of the meeting, which included a strong prioritization of water management, including salinity, soil health, and efficiency enhancement of several types of water application. There will also be  a strong training element.  It will be important to make better use of existing crop-water use models developed for the region; we do not wish to reinvent the wheel. Also included in the priorities was specific work on rangeland shrubs, irrigated forages and livestock. A database will be developed for major characteristics of natural fodder species and irrigated forage crops with emphasis on water-use efficiency. Dr Jan Valkoun, Head of ICARDA's Genetic Resources Unit, is collecting indigenous rangeland forages and shrubs, and will assist in training scientists from the Arabian Peninsula on how to collect and conserve plants from the wild, many of which are tolerant to heat, drought and salinity.  Livestock work will be done in collaboration with our sister Center, the International Livestock Research Institute, based in Kenya. It is an example of how programs like the APRP can broaden host countries' access to the work of other international Centers as well as ICARDA.
        Protected agriculture is also of crucial importance in such a harsh region. This consists of the production of appropriate crops--fruit, vegetables and flowers--in greenhouses or similar structures. The level of experience varies: Qatar, for example,  has been working in the area since the mid-1970s, and Kuwait also has an active sector. However, some other countries have done less. The national programs all made brief presentations on where they stood with regard to this industry. Diverse problems emerged, but there was also commonality; for example, the need to conserve energy and the possibilities of solar power were suggested as fields for research. There is a general problem with excess humidity in the greenhouses and plastic tunnels, as water cannot escape; this renders the plants vulnerable to disease. For the research priorities decided in the March meeting, we again included water-use efficiency--but also integrated pest and disease management and structures design. During 1997-98, APRP will be looking at the economics of structures and verifying the resistance/tolerance of commercial varieties to prevailing viruses and other diseases. And there will, again, be a training element.