San Diego (special) -- With little fanfare, San Diego State University Foundation has helped bring together Israel and eight of its Middle Eastern neighbors in a coordinated assault against a common enemy: the world's growing desert.

Under the auspices of SDSU's Fred J. Hansen Institute for World Peace, representatives of Israel met for several days earlier this month at the U.S. Grant Hotel with counterparts from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, the Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Tunisia and Turkey to plan the joint assault.

Largely thanks to Rep. Ron Packard (R-Oceanside), who sits on the foreign operations subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, a $25 million appropriation ($5 million yearly for five years) was included in the budget bill adopted last year by Congress for a Middle East & Mediterranean Desert Development (MEMDD) program.

Packard had pushed for the funding at the request of the Hansen Institute which has been in the business of Middle East cooperation and peacemaking since 1980 when it first brought together scientists from Egypt and Israel.

Since then, the Institute has helped run cooperative demonstration farms in the deserts of Israel and Egypt, and was instrumental in bringing together Israel and Morocco in a similar cooperative effort in agriculture.

As a result of its practical experience in fostering cooperation among the parties -- and the expressed interest on the part of the nations of the Middle East in having the Hansen Institute continue to administer the cooperative programs -- SDSU Foundation is expected to quickly win formal certification by the United States Agency for International Development as the MEMDD administrator.

In the proposal worked out with the representatives of the nine Middle Eastern countries at the U.S. Grant Hotel conference, SDSU will administer the program which focuses on stewarding water resources in the deserts. Additionally, SDSU will conduct practical research on vegetation patterns in the region by analyzing data pulled down from U.S. weather satellites. 

Toward that end, three professors in SDSU's geography department--Dr. Allen S. Hope, Dr. Richard Wright and Dr. Douglas Stow--participated in the conference.

The lack of news media coverage of the conference in San Diego was not because of any lack of interest on the media's part in Middle Eastern rivals getting together a half a world away to plan cooperative efforts. Rather it was because the SDSU Foundation held the unannounced and low profile meeting in the same kind of quiet, unobtrusive manner that has marked its efforts for 17 years.

HERITAGE learned about the March 9-12 international conference as a result of attending a March 12 speech at the Rancho Bernardo home of Ellen Barnett. by one of the conference's participants, Israeli agriculturalist Dov Pasternak.

Pasternak told a small gathering assembled by Barnett in behalf of the American Associates of Ben Gurion University about some of the surprising outcomes of Ben Gurion University's desert research (please see accompanying story), and described in passing the just concluded conference.

Harry R. Albers, the general manager of the SDSU Foundation who also serves as executive director of its Fred J. Hansen Institute for World Peace, promptly accepted a follow-up interview request from HERITAGE. 

Albers said in the past many of the meetings were kept quiet because the participants insisted upon secrecy, but said at this point there does not appear to be any further need for secrecy.

Stephanie Boyd, SDSU Foundation's communications director, said that conferences such as the one held at the U.S. Grant Hotel where people from countries that formerly considered themselves enemies meet for the first time always require some patient mediation and diplomacy outside the view of news cameras and tape recorders.

She said that Albers, a physicist and astronomer who came to the SDSU Foundationfrom the Smithsonian Institution, is appreciated for his ability to help conference members work through some of their personal and poltical differences and then put those concerns aside in order to concentrate on larger issues for the greater good.

Although there were some moments of tension during the U.S. Grant Hotel conference, overall the sessions were amicable and produced wide agreement, according to Albers, Boyd and Dr. Bonnie A. Stewart, a specialist in agro-economics who was designated by SDSU Foundation to serve as the U.S. director for the MEMDD program. 

Participants also were able to enjoy some beautiful San Diego weather on various recreational outings during breaks in the conference. Among these were jaunts across the street from the hotel to the Horton Plaza Shopping Center as well as a field trip to the campus of San Diego State University to visit the geography department and the SDSU Foundation's headquarters. 

Albers was asked how it happened that San Diego State University became an important player in promoting agricultural cooperation in the Middle East, especially given that SDSU is itself so far from the Middle East and given that it doesn't even have an agricultural department.

The SDSU Foundation general manager chuckled, and said it all came about because one man--Fred J. Hansen--wanted his estate to be used in the cause of world peace, and because the Institute bearing Hansen's name was formed by SDSU at a time when peacemaking between Israel and Egypt was capturing the world's imagination.

He said that Hansen was born in Denmark, and lived briefly in the American Midwest before settling in the Sweetwater area of San Diego County where he became one of the region's largest avocado growers.

When Hansen died in the mid 1970s, he wrote in his will that "if adversary nations can be encouraged to work together on projects of mutual benefit, this can help heal their differences." Acting on that instruction, Hansen's attorney, Leo Henrikson, established the Fred J. Hansen Foundation (separate from the Institute), and visited various college campuses asking for suggestions how Hansen's estate might be put into the service of world peace efforts.

Albers said the SDSU Foundation was inspired by a meeting that took place at Ben Gurion University between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at which the two leaders said marine sciences and desert agriculture were two areas in which their nations should try to cooperate.

The SDSU Foundation suggested to Henrikson that San Diego was perfectly situated to be of assistance in both areas -- the city, afterall, is on the Pacific Ocean and home to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and also is within a short driving distance of the California desert.

Accordingly, the SDSU Foundation formed the Fred J. Hansen Institute for World Peace, and named as its first director Dr. Robert J. Ontell, who was a professor at SDSU's School of Social Work.

"It was almost single-handed through Bob's efforts that we made the first contacts in Egypt and Israel that led to the formulation of the oceanagraphic and desert research programs," Albers said of Ontell. "He was on the phone so much with people in the Middle East, it was once said of him at a large meeting 'Bob Ontell has turned the telephone into a lethal weapon.'"

Ontell, who is a member of San Diego's Jewish community, continues in retirement to serve on the Hansen Institute's Advisory Committee, but while he was director, he "got us going on all the programs we are involved in: without him we would not have started them and we would not be where we are," Albers said admiringly.

With a fund of several hundred thousand dollars a year from Hansen's estate to draw on, SDSU Foundation was in a position to pay for airfares and hotel accommodations for meetings that other institutions simply had no budget for.

Thus in 1980, the Hansen Institute sponsored in San Diego a conference bringing together marine scientists from Egypt and from Israel along with counterparts from Scripps Institution of Oceanagraphy, Texas A&M, and Florida State University. Participants in the 1980 conference successfully hammered out a proposal for a U.S. Agency for International Development grant for a $4.3 million program to promote cooperation in that field among the three countries.

Thereafter the Hansen Foundation turned over the marine sciences program to the New Jersey Marine Science Consortium and Texas A&M University.

In 1981, the Hansen Institute for World Peace sponsored a second conference--this one at the Hilton Hotel on Mission Bay--in which scientists from Israel and Egypt were brought together for a face-to-face meeting. Pasternak, who attended that original meeting, recalled it was one of the most exciting moments of his life, to meet Egyptians face-to face, in a peaceful setting. (He said he had seen Syrians face-to-face before, but through the gunsights of a tank on a Golan Heights battlefield.)

From that 1981 meeting came the creation of the Cooperative Arid Lands Agricultural Research (CALAR) program, financed by the United States Agency for International Development under a fund created largely through the efforts of U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) to further the Israel/ Egypt peace accords. The SDSU Foundation became the program's administrator, with SDSU Sociology Prof. Mohammed El Assal serving as the American coordinator for the Egypt-Israeli programs.
Albers, who added the directorship of the Hansen Institute to his portfolio after Ontell retired, said that original program focused on three areas. 

Those areas included "finding commercial plants (and animal herds) that would grow under desert conditions, including development of strains of jojoba and guayule...developing range management techniques so the lands of the desert wouldn't be overgrazed...and the largest part of the program, the saline water project."

"In Israel we were working in the Negev where there are large underground aquifers that are saline, so the question was how to use that saline water to put the desert into production and how to find the plants, and we concentrated initially on tomatoes and melons," Albers said. "In Egypt we also had saline underground water as well as runoff waters from the Nile's irrigation of the delta."

Under the CALAR program, Albers said, the two countries "developed strains of crops and developed plants that liked desert conditions and saline waters." Sharing information, the Israeli and Egyptian scientists also developed watering regimes for these crops. "Today, because of this program both the Negev and the desert in Egypt are in commercial production," Albers said.

In 1989, "we took over an initiative that was started by the Albert Einstein Peace Prize Foundation in Chicago where they had the idea of an experimental farm in Egypt that would have Americans, Israelis and Egyptians working on it," Albers related.

The Maryut farm, outside Alexandria, was designed to be an "optimum farm that could be developed in the desert region and used as a nursery to develop material and to work with all the farmers in the region."

"A comparable faciliity was set up at the Ramat Negev station," near Beer'sheva, Israel, he said.

The CALAR program next went into "intensive" agriculture in which greenhouses were adapted to desert climates to create year-round growing programs and to develop drought-resistant strains of plants and vegetables that could be transplanted by farmers onto their own lands.

As Egypt and Israel's scientists cooperated, they were protected from the vicissitudes of the politics of the Middle East by sponsors who recognized the overarching importance of turning the deserts into sources of food and economic strength for the two countries.

Albers particularly credited Yousef Wally, Egypt's deputy prime minister and minister of agriculture, for sustaining the cooperative agricultural program during times of extreme international tension.

"Even during the worst times, for instance, when Israel went into Lebanon and Egypt went into what it called its 'cold peace with Israel,' our program was unaffected, and I think, but I'm not sure, that our program may have been the only one unaffected," Albers said. "The scientists continued to work together--they were told they had to work together. It made it more stressful, but the programs have never been interrupted."

In 1992, a program between Israel and Morocco was started with the help of the SDSU Foundation. Dr. Bonnie Stewart, who had taught ag-economics at the American University in Beirut before moving onto the business world, was selected as coordinator of the program which in the beginning started circumspectly.

"At that time," Stewart recalled "the Moroccan government was not willing to work with Israel directly but said we could work through the private sector. In essence that was how we introduced a program in Morocco, working with private businessmen with governmental approval. Since that time we have watched a tremndous evolution in the program."

Initially, Israelis participating in the program had to first fly to Europe, and stay there for a few days until they were given travel documents falesly stating that they had been born in a city of Morocco. Only then could they travel to Morocco. Stewart said it is amazing to realize that this procedure was in effect only five years ago, especially considering that today large Israeli tour groups are regularly welcomed to Morocco.

As in Egypt, where Yousef Wally served as the "godfather" for the program, in Morocco, Andre Azouly, a trusted financial adviser to King Hassan II and a member of Morocco's small Jewish community, became the cooperative program's governmental sponsor.

The Moroccan businessman who volunteered to become the partner for the cooperative venture was Driss Lahlou, president of Mahgreb Agriculture, Stewart said.

With his help, "we introduced some of the Israeli and U.S. technology in plant production techniques, where little, small plants are produced in a nursery and then sold to the farmers," she said. "We have a farm about 45 minutes south of Casablanca in Ait Melloul, and that is where the first site was built."

"We have two nurseries there and we also do some open field work there, some testing of the different varieties of the vegetables that were produced in the programs in Egypt," Stewart said. "The overall goal was to develop a production facility and get these materials to the farmers and to also support these activities through demonstrations and training."

So well received was the program that another site was opened in Agadir, about an hour plane ride south of Casablanca, in one of Morocco's major agricultural regions. "We built a transplant nursery down there," she said. "We are working witht he Hassan II Institute which is an agricultural horticultural institute in Agadir."

The nursery is known as the AMARIS nursery, an acornym for America, Maroc (Morocco in French) and Israel.

Albers said there is a "simple formula" for constructing programs in international cooperation: "Everyone who comes is a full partner: Americans, Israelis, Egyptians, Moroccans. It is not a one-way stream of information going from one point to another. Egyptians are teaching Israelis in some areas; the Israelis are teaching Egyptians in other areas. The same is true with the Morrocans and with the United States."

In 1993, a meeting was held in Casablanca to explore a more regional approach to combating the deserts of North Africa and the Mediterranean. Albers, Stewart and Boyd were among SDSU Foundation representatives at a meeting that attracted participants from Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Spain and the United States.

The Casablance conference participants decided there were six areas worthy of regional cooperation: 1) water and soil resources, land reclamation and irrigation technologies; 2) protected agriculture and controlled environments (greenhouses); 3) crops and genetic materials; 4) livestock; 5) regional intergrated planning and development and 6) agroecology, agroforestry and forestation.

Based on the results of that conference, SDSU Foundation approached Congressman Packard and other members of San Diego's congressional delegation and California's senatorial delegation to suggest a budget appropriation.

After the budget appropriation was adopted, the Hansen Institute for World Peace--using moneys from Hansen's estate--pulled together the conference held at the U.S. Grant Hotel to refine the program and to make formal application to the U.S. Agnecy for International Development for the funding.

As in the programs between Israel and Egypt, and between Israel and Morocco, the multilateral program will have a policy steering committee consisting of officials from the affected countries, and a scientific/technical committee consisting of scientists from the various countries who will review each other's research, visit each other's projects and cooperate directly on some research, Albers said.

The project will "focus on water management in these countries, using water management projects on the ground and remote sensing or GIS (Geospacial Information System) mapping from weather satellites," Albers said.

"There are separate projects for each country, but all are centered around water management whether that be saline waters, runoff waters from irrigation, identifying new aquifers, plants for deserts, or all around water management," Albers said. 

"There is a unifying theme and there are common research interests, and also we are using remote sensing so that we can do a data base for the whole region," he said.

Some of the proposals in the program include:

€In Egypt, development of systems to help farmers decide what crops to grow depending on soil and water conditions.

€In Israel, development of wine grapes with saline water; increasing argan production as a cooking oil crop; expansion of cut flowers production for export, and increasing production of marketable desert plants.

€In Jordan, programs to harvest water utilizing remote satellite sensing technology, and programs to use marginal water and improve irrigation management.

€In Oman, using remote satellite sensing to develop a data base on water supplies.

Dr. Allen Hope, who is a co-director of SDSU's Stephen & Mary Birch Foundation Center for Earth Systems Analysis Research, told HERITAGE that he and his colleagues from SDSU's geography department propose to monitor on a weekly basis vegetation patterns in the Middle East as detected by the sophisticated monitoring equipment aboard U.S. weather satellites.

The data transmitted from the satellite produces a color map of North Africa and the Mediterranean marking in deepest green those areas with the densest vegetation through a spectrum of colors to the sandy brown of deserts with no vegetation at all.

Hope said the data "is important to show us how the natural hydrology is causing the green-up; whether the deserts are spreading and how this changes through the seasons."

Weather satellites have generated data since 1990, which Hope and his colleagues plan to analyze to show normal seasonal patterns of desert vegatation. Where the analysts spot trends not in accord with normal patterns, he said, may be a tip off that overgrazing, overbuilding or other phenomena are causing vegetation zones to shrink and the the desert to increase.

"If we noticed a change, we could go back over 5-6 years, and then plot on a graph the change in greenness for that location and then say to them, 'Look here, year to year the greenness is going down, and the precipitation is going up and down but not on the same trend, so your herding activity must be depleting that resource,'" said Hope, a South African who obtained his doctorate at the University of Maryland and has been teaching at SDSU for the last 10 years. 

"Next, we would get to the social component and decision making," he said. "What should the country be doing to try to ameliorate this?" 

Besides looking at rangeland degradation, the geographers also plan to use some of the data to analyze rates of groundwater recharge, he said.

Although the Hansen Institute for World Peace occasionally has held meetings of a more political nature -- as for example during the 1980s between Israelis and Palestinians to unofficially discuss possible outlines of a peace settlement even before Oslo and the Madrid conferences--officials say it is on the shoulders of scientific knowledge and practical cooperation that hopes for lasting peace are carried.

"The participants look at us as being honest brokers having a real focus to make the programs work, a commitment to make them work, and a dedication to make them work because they are aware it is awfully easy when you hit stone walls at times to say, 'this is too much,'" Albers said.

"It is a matter of going back to the right formula for these programs, picking subject matter that is so important to all these countries that it transcends all the other problems," the SDSU Foundation general manager added. What this project deals with is "feeding people, having a better economy and a better standard of living."