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Salaam alaikum.

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Welcome to Doha.

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I am in charge of making this country's food secure.

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That is my job for the next two years,

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to design an entire master plan,

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and then for the next 10 years to implement it --

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of course, with so many other people.

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But first, I need to talk to you about a story, which is my story,

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about the story of this country that you're all here in today.

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And of course, most of you have had three meals today,

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and probably will continue to have after this event.

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So going in, what was Qatar in the 1940s?

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We were about 11,000 people living here.

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There was no water. There was no energy, no oil, no cars, none of that.

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Most of the people who lived here

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either lived in coastal villages, fishing,

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or were nomads who roamed around with the environment trying to find water.

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None of the glamour that you see today existed.

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No cities like you see today in Doha or Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Kuwait or Riyadh.

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It wasn't that they couldn't develop cities.

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Resources weren't there to develop them.

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And you can see that life expectancy was also short.

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Most people died around the age of 50.

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So let's move to chapter two: the oil era.

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1939, that's when they discovered oil.

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But unfortunately, it wasn't really fully exploited commercially

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until after the Second World War.

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What did it do?

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It changed the face of this country, as you can see today and witness.

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It also made all those people who roamed around the desert --

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looking for water, looking for food,

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trying to take care of their livestock -- urbanize.

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You might find this strange,

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but in my family we have different accents.

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My mother has an accent that is so different to my father,

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and we're all a population of about 300,000 people in the same country.

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There are about five or six accents in this country as I speak.

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Someone says, "How so? How could this happen?"

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Because we lived scattered.

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We couldn't live in a concentrated way simply because there was no resources.

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And when the resources came, be it oil,

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we started building these fancy technologies

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and bringing people together because we needed the concentration.

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People started to get to know each other.

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And we realized that there are some differences in accents.

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So that is the chapter two: the oil era.

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Let's look at today.

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This is probably the skyline that most of you know about Doha.

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So what's the population today?

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It's 1.7 million people.

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That is in less than 60 years.

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The average growth of our economy is about 15 percent for the past five years.

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Lifespan has increased to 78.

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Water consumption has increased to 430 liters.

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And this is amongst the highest worldwide.

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From having no water whatsoever

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to consuming water to the highest degree, higher than any other nation.

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I don't know if this was a reaction to lack of water.

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But what is interesting about the story that I've just said?

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The interesting part is that we continue to grow

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15 percent every year for the past five years without water.

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Now that is historic. It's never happened before in history.

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Cities were totally wiped out because of the lack of water.

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This is history being made in this region.

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Not only cities that we're building,

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but cities with dreams and people who are wishing to be scientists, doctors.

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Build a nice home, bring the architect, design my house.

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These people are adamant that this is a livable space when it wasn't.

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But of course, with the use of technology.

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So Brazil has 1,782 millimeters per year of precipitation of rain.

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Qatar has 74, and we have that growth rate.

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The question is how.

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How could we survive that?

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We have no water whatsoever.

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Simply because of this gigantic, mammoth machine called desalination.

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Energy is the key factor here. It changed everything.

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It is that thing that we pump out of the ground, we burn tons of,

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probably most of you used it coming to Doha.

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So that is our lake, if you can see it.

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That is our river.

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That is how you all happen to use and enjoy water.

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This is the best technology that this region could ever have: desalination.

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So what are the risks?

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Do you worry much?

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I would say, perhaps if you look at the global facts,

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you will realize, of course I have to worry.

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There is growing demand, growing population.

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We've turned seven billion only a few months ago.

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And so that number also demands food.

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And there's predictions that we'll be nine billion by 2050.

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So a country that has no water

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has to worry about what happens beyond its borders.

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There's also changing diets.

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By elevating to a higher socio-economic level,

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they also change their diet.

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They start eating more meat and so on and so forth.

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On the other hand, there is declining yields

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because of climate change and because of other factors.

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And so someone has to really realize when the crisis is going to happen.

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This is the situation in Qatar, for those who don't know.

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We only have two days of water reserve.

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We import 90 percent of our food,

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and we only cultivate less than one percent of our land.

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The limited number of farmers that we have

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have been pushed out of their farming practices

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as a result of open market policy and bringing the big competitions, etc., etc.

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So we also face risks.

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These risks directly affect the sustainability of this nation and its continuity.

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The question is, is there a solution?

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Is there a sustainable solution?

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Indeed there is.

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This slide sums up thousands of pages of technical documents

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that we've been working on over the past two years.

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Let's start with the water.

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So we know very well -- I showed you earlier -- that we need this energy.

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So if we're going to need energy, what sort of energy?

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A depletable energy? Fossil fuel?

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Or should we use something else?

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Do we have the comparative advantage to use another sort of energy?

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I guess most of you by now realize that we do: 300 days of sun.

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And so we will use that renewable energy to produce the water that we need.

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And we will probably put 1,800 megawatts of solar systems

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to produce 3.5 million cubic meters of water.

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And that is a lot of water.

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That water will go then to the farmers,

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and the farmers will be able to water their plants,

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and they will be able then to supply society with food.

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But in order to sustain the horizontal line --

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because these are the projects, these are the systems that we will deliver --

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we need to also develop the vertical line:

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system sustenance, high-level education, research and development,

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industries, technologies, to produce these technologies for application, and finally markets.

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But what gels all of it, what enables it, is legislation, policies, regulations.

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Without it we can't do anything.

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So that's what we are planning to do.

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Within two years we should hopefully be done with this plan

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and taking it to implementation.

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Our objective is to be a millennium city, just like many millennium cities around:

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Istanbul, Rome, London, Paris, Damascus, Cairo.

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We are only 60 years old, but we want to live forever

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as a city, to live in peace.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)