Saudi Arabia has no permanent rivers or lakes. Rainfall is low and unreliable. Cereals can be cultivated only through expensive projects that deplete underground reservoirs. Dairy cattle must be cooled with fans and machines that spray them with water mists. This is not, in short, a nation that would normally be associated with large-scale agriculture. But that could be about to change. Boosted by revenues from the oil boom and concerned about food security, the kingdom is scouring the globe for fertile lands in a search that has taken Saudi officials to Sudan, Ukraine, Pakistan and Thailand. Their plan is to set up large-scale projects overseas that will later involve the private sector in growing crops such as corn, wheat and rice. Once a country has been selected, each project could be in excess of 100,000 hectares - about 10 times the size of Manhattan island - and the majority of the crop would be exported back, officials say. While Saudi Arabia's plans are among the grandest, they reflect growing interest in such projects among capital-rich countries that import most of their food. The United Arab Emirates is looking into Kazakhstan and Sudan, Libya is hoping to lease farms in Ukraine and South Korea has hinted at plans in Mongolia. Even China - with plenty of cultivable land but not a lot of water - is exploring investments in south-east Asia. "This is a new trend within the global food crisis," says Joachim von Braun, director of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute. "The dominant force today is security of food supplies." Alarmed by exporting countries' trade restrictions - such as India's curbs on exports of rice, Ukraine's halt to wheat shipments and Argentina's imposition of heavy taxes on overseas sales of soya - importing countries have realised that their dependence on the international food market makes them vulnerable not only to an abrupt surge in prices but, more crucially, to an interruption in supplies. As a result, food security is at the top of the political agenda for the first time since the 1970s. "The food crisis gave alarms for all countries to look for places to secure supplies of agricultural goods," says Abdullah al-Obaid, the deputy minister of agriculture in Saudi Arabia. Mr von Braun, echoing the opinion of dozens of other officials interviewed by the Financial Times, says that faith in the international food market is waning. For the first time since the early 1990s, when trade in farm products rose sharply, many are starting to doubt the wisdom of depending on agricultural imports. "The importers are nervous and they have realised that they [had] better have a stake in countries with potential for agriculture exports," he says. With global food consumption rising, largely due to demand for a meat-rich diet in emerging economies, the challenge of feeding booming populations in countries such as Saudi Arabia is growing by the year. Cereal prices have come off their highs of earlier this year but are still more than three times their average over the past decade. Food security is firmly behind every plan to invest in agriculture overseas. During a recent tour of central Asia, Khalifa bin Zayed, the UAE president, pointed to the need to lock in supplies. "The UAE is looking at implementing some agricultural projects in Kazakhstan as part of its efforts to develop stable food sources for its needs," he said. For countries rich in cultivable land and water but short of capital, such plans could also make a lot of sense. Wheat fields in Ukraine, for example, yield less than 3,000kg a hectare in spite of some of the world's most fertile soils and abundant rain. That is well below the US's yield of about 6,500kg a hectare, achieved in less optimal conditions. But more tractors, a lot more fertiliser, better techniques and higher-yielding seeds could change the situation. Lennart B