Until the late 1980s, 90% of Egypt’s agricultural land was arable; however, the country’s arable agricultural land has been decreasing at an annual rate of 0.5 percent, according to World Bank data.
While Egypt had 37,338 square kilometers (km2) of agricultural land as of 2016, almost 75 percent of the agricultural land is arable.
From the 1989 to 2016, Mauritius has then taken the lead with at least 88 percent of its agricultural land classified as arable land. Nonetheless, Mauritius’s arable land has decreased by an average of 0.05 percent since 1970.
The largest amount of arable land in the region is available in Nigeria and Sudan with 340,000 and 198,232 km2 respectively. Almost 50 percent of Nigeria’s agricultural land is arable, where as nearly 30 percent of Sudan’s agricultural land is classified as arable.
Saudi Arabia, interestingly, has the largest agriculture landscape making it the holder of the largest agricultural land in the Middle East of 1.7 million km2. However, only around 2.2 percent of its agricultural land is arable.
Although over 64% of Djibouti’s landscape classifies as agricultural land, less than 0.1% of landscape is arable. Similarly, Oman has 0.09 percent of its landscape classified as arable land, despite having more than 14,000 km2 of agricultural land.
