San Diego (special) -- The great wine regions of the 21st century? The Napa and Sonoma valleys of California. The Bordeaux region of France. And the highland areas of Israel's Negev Desert.

You could lose a lot of bets if you laugh too hard at the last prediction. The man who made it, agricultural expert Dov Pasternak of Ben-Gurion University, has a life long history of recognizing opportunities in the desert others failed to recognize.

Pasternak's credo, repeated at a March 12 meeting sponsored by the American Associates of Ben Gurion University: "You have to be ingenious to develop the desert. You have to think differently. You have to act differently. You have to look for non-conventional solutions, and when you find them, you can really do something."

His idea for Negev wines has been germinating since 1971 when, as a young PhD he began experimenting on using the saline water under the Negev to grow crops.

Back then, "I told my bosses I wanted to do saline water research, because you don't have to desalinate it--it's too expensive--and you can use the water as it is," Pasternak told a small gathering at the Rancho Bernardo home of Ellen Barnett, a supporter of Ben Gurion University.

Although his superiors remained unconvinced, Pasternak was permitted to siphon onto a plot of desert land some water that was being pumped from 3,000 feet below the Negev to a desalinization plant. 

"I started to do research on saline irrigation...and I have been doing it ever since, until today," Pasternak said. "It has been a success. I started with salt-tolerant plants like cotton, and wheat and some forage grasses, so the farmers started to realize that there is a kind of hidden treasure in the Negev. They started to use this water and very soon they started to build another settlement and another settlement, and now there are a lot of settlements in the Negev where they are using saline water irrigation."
The next step in his saline water research was in the mid 1980s when he started growing tomatoes. "When I tasted these tomatoes, I found that they are very tasty, extremely tasty, and very soon realized that saline water, salty water, improves the quality of tomatoes terrifically," he said.

A team of scientists helped Pasternak further develop the idea, and "very soon they came up with these very superior tomatoes, which we call 'Desert Sweet Tomatoes.' And today it is a booming industry."
Pacing up and down Barnett's living room, his enthusiasm growing, Pasternak said that now "there is a big group of investors from Cleveland who are going to build additional greenhouses in the Negev, and it is all exported to Canada and to the East Coast of the United States. I don't think Desert Sweet Tomatoes have reached San Diego but they are there in New York, Washington D.C., Cleveland and Montreal, and they fetch very high prices. They sell them in the market for about $4 or $5 a pound. And the farmer is getting $2 per kilo, which is a lot for them, and the farmers are getting rich."

The next project was "Desert Sweet Melons," Pasternak said. "What we found actually was that salinity, instead of being something bad, actually is a big blessing. So now there is a big movement in the Negev to see what else we can improve with salinity."

Wine!

"We got the scientists to work on this idea--maybe salt improves the taste of wine--and indeed we found that the wine that is produced with saline water irrigation has a superior quality," Pasternak said.
"They made some comparisons, and the wine from this region compares -- it's slightly better -- than the Golan wine, which is the red wine of Israel. We still continue to do the research, it is not completed yet, but the idea is to have vineyards from Sde Boker to Mitzpe Ramon," he said. "This is the Negev highlands at an elevation of 1,200 feet to 3,000 feet which gives a good climate for wine production."

He said at Kibbutz Sde Boker--where Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion is buried--"they have already planted their first winery with saline irrigation."

"So things are developing all the time, and the whole idea is to have innovations, to have nonconventional techniques," Pasternak said. "In other words, what we are really trying to do: we are turning the 'disadvantages' of the desert into advantages."

"Saline water now is an advantage," Pasternak added. "Some of my friends told me that the difference between the farmers of the Negev and those somewhere else is that somewhere else they have to add salt to the water."

Other projects in which Pasternak and the Ben Gurion University are helping to spawn new Israeli industries are desert greenhouses powered by solar energy; the introduction to the Negev of drought-resistant plants imported from the deserts of the world; use of seawater to grow plants for landscaping (Ben Gurion's grave, in fact, is covered with plants irrigated with sea water); developing new hybrid fruits, and raising flowers and ornamental branches for export.

Although the idea is not so far along as that of desert wine, Pasternak believes a potentially far more important agricultural development for the world at large will be a massive transplantation program to provide permanent crops for starving portions of Africa.

"What we know today as agriculture in the temperate countries and the tropical countries of the world is mostly a result of the massive transfer of crops from one continent to another," he said. 

Think of the large crops of the United States. He said that corn came from Mexico. The potato came from Peru. Wheat originated in Israel.
Similarly, he said, Brazil exports coffee--which originated in Ethiopia. it also exports sugar, which comes from Southeast Asia, and soybean, which come from China. 

On the other hand, he said, "Africa produces cocoa and it comes from Brazil. Indoniesia and Malaysia produce rubber from the rubber tree which is from Brazil."

"But nothing like this was done for the arid and semi-arid regions, this kind of movement of crops, because there was no interest there," Pasternak said. "Since we analyzed this experience and since we have such a good experience in our Negev in the introduction of crops, let's do it for the semi-arid countries."

"Lucky for us, UNESCO financed this project and established it only this last year, 1996," Pasternak related. "And UNESCO said you must start with Africa--Africa has the biggest need for this kind of activity; it is the only part of the world where the standard of living is actually going down every year...So now we are working in Africa with this idea of introducing onto arid lands crops that will help agriculture."

"To give you an example," the scientist continued, "the date palm exists in the Sahara Desert which is north of the semi-arid portion of Africa; it never moved south of the Sahara. There was no interest, no research, nothing was done on it. But we claim that if we have those dates planted over shallow water tables, the roots of the dates will stay in the water, and you can have a source of food security for the whole of semi-arid Africa."

"So," he said, 'we are already organizing this June in Niger a program called 'Dates for the Sahel,' where we are going to bring the best experts of the world to discuss the possibility of bringing those dates from the Sahara to the area south of the Sahara where the problem of starvation is the biggest today."

Pasternak said that Israel also has been cooperating with Egypt and Morocco in desert research projects, and now plans to team with other countries in the North African and Mediterranean region to fight the deserts in a program coordinated by San Diego State University Foundation.