[imtringued]

I looked into agriculture in North African countries. You can do crazy things with greenhouses and aquaponics but compared to simple fertile soil it is very expensive. So the problem shifted into creating fertile soil and once I read up on afforestation it feels absolutely trivial but the scale of the problem is so big that only governments can attempt it.

USA gives those countries foreign aid in dollars which are then spent on weapons and food imports when afforestation programs are actually what is really needed there. It's not rocket science. You install sand barriers to prevent erosion and you plant trees to increase the water capacity of the soil and 50 years later you have a nice forest which you can convert to farmland.