I guess those quotes alone say something about the insane magnitude of the mismanagement of Saudia Arabia’s oil resources. This unsustainable waste pushed the government to give up:

“Within four years, by the end of 1996, 76 percent of the new wheat-growing surface added between 1980 and 1992 were abandoned”

“On January 8, 2008, Reuters and other news agencies, quoting officials from the Saudi Arabian agriculture and finance ministries, reported that purchases of wheat from local farmers would be reduced by 12.5 percent, with the aim of relying entirely on imports by 2016.”

“The experience proved merely that throwing money to import the expertise and the machinery to extract mammoth volumes of water could make even a desert bloom, until either the money or the water ran out.”

I remember once reading that the central third of Sudan could feed billions if exploited to its full agricultural potential. This might be an exaggeration, but the potential is definitely huge. One of the serious issues hampering its full use is obviously the chronic unrest. Now, one could think that, one possible idea among many, given Saudi’s military expenses, its diplomatic strength, its proximity – both geographical and cultural – with Sudan could have logically led to Saudi Arabia making Sudan its stable agricultural backyard. This would have been both sustainable, profitable, and would have given it the food security it officially sought. But then again, mismanagement of epic proportions. Or, it may be, misplaced rentier elite incentives:

“The Saudi ruling elite is composed of four groups. (…)It is thought by some that Saudi desert agriculture was a scheme to enrich these groups, their families, and clients. There are three observations that tend to support that theory.

The first observation is the large scale of the wheat project. Between 1985 and 1993, Saudi wheat production grew well beyond domestic needs and the country's storage capacity. By 1992, Saudi Arabia became the world's sixth-largest exporter of wheat. Had the objective been meeting local demand, the quantities would have been considerably smaller.

Second, the early participants in desert agriculture were investors, not farmers. (…) The promise of high financial returns from government subsidies to wheat growing enticed some of the country's richest business families, mainly from the Riyadh and the Qassim Regions, to underwrite the risk of the new adventure.”