The Middle East and North Africa region faces a paradox at the heart of its food future. With more than 70% of the region’s food needs met by imports, climate change accelerating water stress, and over half the population living in countries classified as water-scarce, the case for local food production has never been stronger. Yet conventional open-field agriculture in MENA is brutally water-intensive and increasingly unviable as temperatures rise.
Controlled-environment agriculture, and high-tech greenhouses in particular, is widely seen as part of the answer. Greenhouses can cut water consumption by up to 90% compared to open-field farming, enable year-round production, and shrink the food miles attached to imported produce. But there is a catch that often gets overlooked in regional discussions: greenhouses themselves are energy-intensive. In hot climates, cooling them is the challenge; in cooler ones, heating is. Either way, the energy source matters enormously to the sustainability case.
This is where the Netherlands offers MENA a quietly fascinating model worth studying.
The Dutch Greenhouse Industry’s Quiet Energy Transition
The Netherlands is the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter despite being smaller than many MENA cities. Its Westland region, a dense cluster of greenhouse horticulture west of Rotterdam, has become a global benchmark for productivity per hectare. For decades, that productivity ran on natural gas, with greenhouses among the largest industrial gas consumers in the country.
Over the past fifteen years, that has been changing. Dutch growers have been steadily transitioning to geothermal heat, drawing warm water from aquifers two to three kilometres underground to heat their greenhouses. The model is collaborative: rather than each grower drilling their own well, clusters of horticultural businesses share infrastructure, splitting the capital cost and sharing the heat through transmission grids.
The scale is striking. Projects like Trias Westland connect more than fifty horticultural companies to a single geothermal source. The Vogelaer geothermal project, currently being expanded, will supply heat to nineteen new customers through underground transport pipelines installed via directional drilling. These are not pilot projects. They are operational infrastructure delivering renewable heat to commercial growers at industrial scale.
One Dutch company, VB, has been responsible for designing and building roughly 80% of these above-ground geothermal installations across the country. Their portfolio illustrates how mature the model has become, ranging from individual greenhouse installations to multi-grower regional grids.
Why This Matters For MENA?
The instinctive reaction is to ask whether geothermal energy is even relevant in a region people associate with oil and sun. It is more relevant than most realise.
MENA has substantial geothermal potential, particularly along the East African Rift system extending into the Red Sea, in parts of western Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, and Iran. The Yemeni and Iranian geothermal resources are well-documented, and several MENA countries have begun preliminary geothermal mapping. The temperatures needed for greenhouse heating are also far lower than those required for electricity generation, meaning lower-grade geothermal resources, which are more widespread, can still be valuable.
But the more immediately transferable lesson is not about heating. It is about the structural model: shared infrastructure across clusters of agricultural producers.
In MENA, where high-tech greenhouse projects are increasingly clustered (think of agritech zones in the UAE, Saudi Arabia’s NEOM food strategy, Qatar’s post-blockade self-sufficiency push, or Morocco’s expanding controlled-environment sector), the question of who pays for and operates shared sustainable energy infrastructure is unresolved. The Dutch experience shows that cooperative geothermal grids serving multiple growers are technically feasible and commercially viable, provided the cluster is dense enough to justify the capital investment.
The same logic could apply to other shared sustainable energy sources in MENA: solar thermal cooling networks, waste heat from desalination plants feeding into greenhouse climate systems, or shared cogeneration facilities. The Westland model is really a model of cooperative infrastructure, and that is exportable.
What a Dutch Greenhouse Looks Like in a Hot Climate
The other lesson MENA can take from Dutch greenhouse builders is technical. Companies like VB have been exporting their turnkey greenhouse expertise to climates very different from the Netherlands, including a 31.5-hectare high-tech greenhouse in Querétaro, Mexico, equipped with full climate control, pipe rail systems, cultivation piping, and CO2 dosing. Mexican high-altitude conditions are not identical to Gulf summers, but the engineering principles for managing extreme conditions translate well: insulation, evaporative cooling, screening, and integrated climate management.
For MENA decision-makers evaluating greenhouse investments, this is worth noting. The Dutch turnkey model, where a single contractor designs, builds, and equips a complete greenhouse with climate and energy systems integrated from day one, produces facilities that perform reliably from delivery. That contrasts with the more common regional pattern of stitching together imported components from multiple suppliers, which often results in underperformance.
Recommendations for MENA Policymakers and Investors
A few practical takeaways emerge from the Dutch experience.
- Cluster planning matters more than individual projects: Sustainable energy infrastructure for greenhouses becomes economically viable at the cluster level, not the single-farm level. MENA agritech zones should be designed with shared energy infrastructure in mind from the outset.
- Geothermal resource mapping deserves more attention: Even modest geothermal resources can heat or, with absorption chillers, help cool greenhouses. National geothermal surveys focused on agricultural applications would be a useful investment for several MENA countries.
- Knowledge transfer beats technology import: The Dutch advantage is not a secret technology. It is decades of operational know-how. MENA universities, research institutes, and government agencies should pursue active partnerships with Dutch counterparts, including Wageningen University and established greenhouse builders, rather than relying on one-off equipment purchases.
- Long-term financing models need to evolve: Geothermal infrastructure has high upfront costs and long payback periods. The Dutch model relies on cooperative structures, government-backed insurance for drilling risk, and long-term offtake agreements among growers. MENA financiers and policymakers should study these structures.
A Greener MENA Through Smarter Greenhouses
Food security in MENA cannot be solved by greenhouses alone, but greenhouses, done well, can be a meaningful part of the response. The Dutch experience shows that the technology and the cooperative models exist, are mature, and are exportable. The opportunity for MENA is to learn from a region that has spent decades refining sustainable greenhouse horticulture, and to adapt those lessons to local conditions rather than reinvent them.
The future of food in MENA may well be greener, quite literally, if the region’s planners look carefully at what has been quietly built in the Dutch Westland.
