The application, end to end
The modules run in order of use: what the question is, what the options are, how they are read, how they compare, which survive a given zone's classification, and what happened when they were tried elsewhere.
The Question
Why allocation is a policy choice rather than a technical result, what this application does and does not evaluate, and the boundary against the evaluation itself.
Model Catalogue
Every mechanism grouped by what the state contributes and what it keeps — how it works, where it has been implemented, and how it reads against all thirteen criteria.
Impact Framework
What each criterion asks, how it is read, and how it is commonly misread — then the seven places where improving one reading reliably degrades another.
Comparison Matrix
Five groups against thirteen criteria, side by side. Every cell states what that group does — never a rating, and no row or column produces a total.
Zone Routing
A zone's classification closes some mechanisms before anyone chooses between the rest. Build a composite code and see which models remain available.
Precedent Cases
Seven programmes that allocated state land, with what was done and what resulted — including the failures, and what transfers to the Kingdom against what does not.
Economic impact means food security, not treasury return
This is the instruction most easily lost. An allocation study that drifts into fiscal appraisal starts favouring whichever mechanism returns most money to the state — a different question, and one nobody asked.
- Import substitution — what the model displaces from the import bill
- Self-sufficiency contribution on strategic commodities
- Commodity coverage — cereals, forage, dates, vegetables, protein
- Supply-chain resilience against disruption and price shocks
- Production volume, reliability, and time to production
- Capital mobilised, as a measure of development achieved
- Corporate tax receipts
- Lease and licence revenue to the state
- Fiscal return on public investment
- Land sale proceeds
- Job creation counted as tax base
- Any treasury-facing return metric
Weighting social impact against economic impact is a political judgement
A composite score would require deciding how much citizen participation is worth against how much import substitution. That decision belongs to the Ministry, not to an analysis. Producing one number would embed a policy choice inside what presents as a technical output, and would conceal precisely the trade-off the comparison exists to reveal.
This follows the rule already applied in the evaluation, where capability, water, land rights and crop suitability are reported as four independent answers and never averaged into one.
Three questions, kept apart on purpose
Separating the applications is what stops a permission question being answered with an economic argument, or the reverse. This application takes the evaluation's findings as given and does not re-open them.
| Application | Answers | Never answers |
|---|---|---|
| App 1 — Land Evaluation | Is agriculture possible, watered, permitted, and suited to a crop | Whether it is profitable, or who should develop it |
| App 2 — Database | Where every value comes from, and how far it can be trusted | What should be done with the finding |
| App 3 — Investment | By what mechanism land reaches an operator | Whether the land is suitable — that is already settled |
What this application inherits
These gaps sit beneath every economic statement made here. They are listed because economic language reads as more authoritative than the physical findings supporting it, and the qualification has to be visible rather than implied.
| Open item | Effect on this application |
|---|---|
| No Saudi-calibrated crop thresholds | Production estimates are indicative only |
| Area ledger values not computed | No area totals available to size any model |
| Governorate boundary layer not obtained | Zones not yet generated |
| Water and land-rights elements ministry-dependent | Area availability unconfirmed |
| Minimum viable areas unconfirmed against the Terms of Reference | Operator-class routing is provisional |
| Five sub-models with no located implementation | Carried as structures, not presented as record |
No economic statement here is firmer than the physical findings beneath it
Production and self-sufficiency statements in this application are indicative. Crop thresholds are not yet calibrated for Saudi conditions, the area ledger is not computed, and the water and land-rights elements await ministry data.
The Ministry weighs these options. This application makes the trade-offs visible so that the choice is made with them in view.