Desalination for irrigation

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 In this blog I briefly discuss a story that caught my attention from Somaliland using desalination. I discuss the benefits of the project and whether it is a feasible response for African nations.

The main drawback for the desalination of seawater is its high-cost and so is often regarded too costly for use in growing crops. However, Seawater Greenhouse is a start-up disputing this claim. The video below demonstrates how they use pan and fan technology in Somaliland to create a cool humid microclimate inside greenhouses to grow a variety of crops including lettuces and tomatoes. The microclimate created reduces the water uptake of crops up to ten to one hundred-fold dependent on numerous variables. This project successfully utilises desalinated water for irrigation due to the reduced water uptake.


Current small areas of irrigated land in Africa (FAO, 2005)
This project is particularly interesting as it is a potential way of increasing the viable agricultural land area in arid regions of Africa. Moreover, the project also tends to the by-product of desalination, brine by utilising it to create salt rather than discarding it (Akinaga et al., 2018). However, due to its large demand for (sea)water to create the microclimates, the project is more suited to the 38 costal nations of Africa. To end, deploying technological solutions has the potential to increase the availability and supply of water (for irrigation) across Africa and address food insecurity. In the future, additional irrigated land will be needed for farmers to adapt to increasingly variable rainfall. Despite this innovative and exciting technology, the question must remain do African nations have the concurrent means to implement this technology at scale?


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