The US-Israeli war on Iran has severely constrained, as has now been widely reported, the main maritime route for the transit of fossil fuels and downstream commodities such as fertilizers through the Strait of Hormuz. As a result, Gulf states have scrambled to find viable alternatives by reviving and accelerating old and new pipeline projects, land-based routes, and railway networks. The deepening of the Saudi-UAE divide that has hardened since 2017 over Yemen, Israel, and the horn of Africa, has reignited jousting over regional logistical supremacy in the wake of the Strait’s closure. Relatively speaking, Saudi Arabia has benefited from the Strait of Hormuz blockade, regaining its place as an indispensable trade hub, while the UAE’s position as the regional re-export hub has waned. Amid this regional scramble, the Kingdom of Jordan has become a key site of logistical contestation. In August 2026, Jordan’s Parliament voted in favor to expand land expropriation rules to facilitate major national infrastructure projects, specifically the $2.3 billion Aqaba Port Railway Project, funded by Emirati investment. Under this expanded framework, 3,999 dunums of agricultural land is being expropriated by the state for the railway, justified in the name of infrastructure serving the “public benefit.” However, this supposed national infrastructure project has raised the question: what does “public benefit” mean when the state acts simultaneously as regulator, landowner, and shareholder, and hands farmland to a majority foreign-owned company for export revenue? This article traces this question from the geopolitics of the strait of Hormuz closure to the fields of the Jordan Valley. We highlight how local land grabs are emerging as a direct expression of regional realignment, bolstered by lack of transparency and a legacy of concession decisions that continue to reproduce power imbalances.
Context and Background
Emirati investment in Jordan’s infrastructure is one of the latest efforts of Gulf capital to reorganize supply chain routes in the region in recent years, reshaping social and class relations and reconfiguring spatial formations of peripheral countries. The UAE has been especially active on this front. After exiting OPEC in May, it expedited its second pipeline to the eastern Fujairah port along the Gulf of Oman, which would theoretically circumvent the Strait of Hormuz. It also fast-tracked its own land-based corridor by signing an MOU for an unprecedented $2.3 billion logistical partnership in the Aqaba Port Railway Project in Jordan. This corridor, financed by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign investment platform L’IMAD Holding and led by Etihad Rail, is a 360-kilometer freight rail that connects the Kingdom’s Ghor Al-Safi and Al-Shidiya mining areas to the Port of Aqaba, whose key general cargo and multipurpose facility is run through a joint venture between the UAE’s AD Ports Group and the Aqaba Development Corporation (ADC). With this agreement, AD Ports Group adds yet another port to its already impressive roster which recently added the Safina Shipping Services and Transmar & TCI in Egypt.
Several countries in the region, including Oman, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria, have shown themselves receptive to this rerouting of trade, opening their logistical infrastructure to Gulf investment and repositioning themselves as alternative transit corridors. Energy shipping companies in the region have reportedly begun using ship-to-ship (STS) transfers off the coast of Sohar port in Oman as a logistical workaround for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The US energy company Chevron has plans to lead on the rehabilitation of the Iraq-Syria pipeline connecting the Iraqi fields of the Basra Oil Company to global export markets via Syria’s Baniyas port. The port is already an avenue for Iraqi oil as 700 tanker trucks carrying 12 million barrels cross the border daily in an attempt by Iraq to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz blockade.
But oil and gas are not the only commodities being rerouted through these alternative corridors. More crucially, the passage of fertilizers through the Strait of Hormuz has been indefinitely halted, cutting off a route that carries one-third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade. Among the fertilizers affected is potash, one of the three primary nutrient fertilizers alongside nitrogen and phosphate. Together with potential other global catastrophic developments such the coming El Niño, this risks sparking severe food shortages across the globe. The UAE’s expansion into the Red Sea via Egypt’s Safina Shipping Service and Jordan’s Aqaba Port Railway Project attempt to counterbalance this fertilizer shortage; the former specializes in shipping fertilizers, metals, and minerals, while the latter connects the Jordanian Arab Potash Company, the largest producer of potash in the region, along with a coterie of mineral companies, to the UAE managed port of Aqaba. The railway has raised political questions amid discussions of supply chain corridors like IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Corridor), transporting gas, oil, and other natural resources to Europe via ports in Israel. There is no official confirmation that the potash railway is directly part of IMEC; still, anti-normalization voices fear that Emirati ownership of Jordanian infrastructure could eventually connect to Israeli-linked ports and the Israeli economy, directly or indirectly
The Arab Potash Company and the Expropriation of Jordan Valley Lands
The Jordanian government has spent the past year expanding its legal authority to seize agricultural land in the southern Ghor for two connected projects: the Aqaba Port Railway Project and the operations of the Arab Potash Company (APC), a mining firm that has held exclusive rights to Dead Sea minerals since 1958. The two are linked because APC, along with the Jordan Phosphate Mines Company, the Government Investments Management Company, and the Social Security Investment Fund, is a partner in the $2.3 billion Aqaba Port Railway Project, financed jointly with the UAE’s Etihad Rail.
The land seizures for this effort unfolded in stages. In September 2025, Jordan’s Land Department first announced the expropriation, framing it narrowly: land was being taken solely to build the railway for APC use and public benefit. By the time the Council of Ministers issued its final expropriation decision on 29 October 2025, the justification had widened. The decision now cited the land as needed for purposes of Arab Potash Company's projects and purposes in its own right, folding APC's separate mining expansion into the same legal action that had originally been justified by the railway alone.
However, after technical studies found geological risks, including the possible presence of caves, along the original alignment, the railway's route was moved outside the expropriated farmland in Ghor Fifa and Safi. But the expropriation of that land, 3,499 dunums in total, was not reversed; it stayed in place, now serving the expansion of the Arab Potash Company mining operations rather than the railway that had first justified taking it.
Nearly a year later, the government moved to put this kind of seizure on firmer legal footing going forward ahead of the railway’s construction beginning. Through the summer of 2026, Parliament worked through a broader amendment to Jordan’s Real Estate Ownership Law: the Lower House approved it article by article between late July and early August, and a Senate committee gave final approval on 16 August 2026, describing the bill as establishing a framework for land expropriation for major national infrastructure projects, and naming the Southern Ghor railway specifically as a project the framework was meant to cover. The Senate committee framed the law as seeking to balance public interest and development needs against citizens’ property rights, echoing the constitutional language of “public benefit” that already governs expropriation under Article 11 of the Jordanian Constitution. Among the articles the Lower House passed on 2 August 2026 was one that expanded the legal definition of “road” to include “railway lines,” with the term continuing to encompass roads and their associated infrastructure. Since expropriation authority in Jordanian property law runs through that definition of “road,” the amendment wrote railway construction directly into the category of infrastructure eligible for state seizure. Moreover, an additional 1,345 dunums are set to be expropriated for the railway. Despite the planned route remaining unclear, it is clear that the process of land grabs under this project is still ongoing.
The Arab Potash Company was incorporated in 1956 as one of the first joint Arab economic ventures, and in 1958 the Jordanian government granted it a hundred-year concession — the Minister of State for Legal Affairs dates it to 1957 — conferring exclusive rights to extract and market Dead Sea minerals until 2058. Article 6 of that concession law allows the company to obtain additional land it may need for concession purposes, either by renting it or by asking the government to acquire it on its behalf, with fair compensation owed to private owners. The consortium that holds this right today is far from the same regionally based company that received it. After partial privatization in 2003 and the transfer of the strategic foreign stake from Canadian to Chinese hands in 2018, SDIC Mining Investment is currently the largest single shareholder of the Arab Potash Company, a subsidiary of a Chinese central state-owned enterprise, with 28 percent ownership. The Jordanian state holds 26.1 percent through the Government Investments Management Company, with a further 10.4 percent through the Social Security Corporation. The remainder sits with the Arab Mining Company, an inter-governmental body, and with the governments of Iraq, Libya and Kuwait. Altogether, non-Jordanian holdings come to roughly sixty percent — the figure opponents cite when they describe the beneficiary of the expropriation as a foreign-owned business interest.
Article 11 of the Jordanian Constitution, the same “public benefit” standard invoked above, also sets the terms on which expropriation can be challenged. According to the Official Gazette, roughly 2,179 dunums — about sixty-two percent of the area expropriated — belong to seventy-six families. The remaining 1,320 dunums are held by institutions: approximately 1,305 by the Jordan Valley Authority, 15.4 by the Agricultural Credit Corporation, and 31.2 by Jordan Ahli Bank. Behind those figures are some three thousand agricultural workers whose income depends on this land, and families holding usufruct rights over state property who reclaimed it from salinity over decades and built its irrigation infrastructure themselves. That tenure arrangement — cultivating and improving land the state formally owns — shapes everything that follows because it determines whose rights the law recognizes and who gets to “benefit” from these concessions.
This is not the first dispute in Jordan over land use for public benefit or economic development, through private or public projects. The state has largely benefited from the legal vagueness around land, whether private or public, and particularly around the claims of seizure serving public benefit. Which projects and which companies get access to these lands is a recurrent issue in Jordan. In 2018, the Dana Biosphere Reserve — Jordan’s largest and most diverse protected region — was doubly threatened by the establishment of the Abu Khushayba Copper Mine agreement by the Jordanian Integrated Mining and Exploration Company, a public-private joint venture. The mine enabled the land expropriation in Dana twice over, once from the local community and then again from the reserve. This enabled the mine to extract around 845,000 tons of copper primed for export. In both cases, community members were not included in the decision making around land use, nor were they given a plan of how they would be included in the supposed distribution of the economic benefits.
Projects such as the Abu Khushaybah Copper Agreement built on the legal and administrative avenue of the pre-emptive declaration that all Wadi Araba land is Treasury/state property, in order to prevent land claims against the mining concessionaire under the auspices of economic development and resource management. This freed the Jordanian state from the obligation to compensate local populations—a strategy made possible given the complex and often unrecognized customary uses that characterize these areas.
Similarly, energy megaprojects funded by UAE capital have benefitted from Jordan’s unclear land tenure. Baynouna, the Kingdom’s largest solar plant, owned by Masdar and Taaleri Energia and financed by the International Finance Corporation, producing more than 200 MWp and costing upwards of $260 million, was built on land the developer described as vacant desert with no land claims. In 2020, sixty-six members of the Al Balqa tribes filed a complaint with the IFC’s ombudsman, stating the land had been used by their tribes for generations for grazing and barley cultivation. A 2025 investigation confirmed they were never consulted and lost access and livelihoods without compensation.
Land rights, sovereignty, and the question of public benefit
The similarities with land acquisitions in Ghor al-Safi for the railway project are uncanny. Both invoke the same discourses of development or public benefit, whether through infrastructure such as the railway, resource management and clean energy, or economic development through extraction and mining, on land whose existing users are treated as legally absent, with the affected community’s claims surfacing only after the project is underway. The key difference is that Ghor al-Safi’s land is formally titled, so a (flawed) expropriation and compensation process was still legally required, while Baynouna’s claims were customary, so no such process was triggered, and redress came only years later and from an external body rather than Jordan’s legal system. However, even with formal land titles, farmers in Ghor were treated as absent, many sharing that they only found out about the expropriation of their lands when survey crews, drilling rigs, and survey markers appeared on their lands. What makes the Ghor case particularly alarming is that the presence of legally recognized tenure has not protected landowners.
The railway route remains unclear even as communities have repeatedly demanded access to further information and transparency around the development plans. These demands are especially relevant given the gap between stated project objectives, legal formal mechanisms, and actual outcome in state and private capital projects. This lack of transparency is particularly worrying given the shifting stated aims of expropriation: from a national railway infrastructure to the Arab Potash Company’s concession activities, whereby the state is seen to use its land expropriation mechanisms in the service of a “partially” foreign entity. Moreover, opponents to the railway project cite this majority-foreign ownership to argue that the expropriation has drifted beyond the public benefit it was issued for, toward purposes that framework was never meant to cover. It has since sparked much public discussion as to what extent private investment can be considered to constitute public benefit.
Jordan farms about two percent of its land. Almost none of the rest can be cultivated; the country is arid, water-poor, and dependent on imports for most of what it eats. What little land does produce is therefore disproportionately consequential to food security, as became clear when local agrarian production cushioned disruptions to food supply chains during the initial shock of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The southern end of the Jordan Valley is among the Kingdom’s most productive agricultural areas. Vegetable cultivation across the valley covered around 178,000 dunums in 2024, some 47,000 in Ghor al-Safi alone, where a hot winter climate lets crops reach market months ahead of the rest of the region. The same ground sits above the Dead Sea’s mineral deposits, which have made potash one of Jordan’s largest export earners, though its revenue flows narrowly. Agriculture and extraction occupy the same terrain, but they do not have equivalent claims: one sustains local livelihoods and national food security, the other primarily serves export markets and shareholders.
Opposition has organized into the لجنة حماية الأغوار الجنوبية [South Jordan Valley Protection Committee], a body formed by the affected landholders and other members of civil society. The committee has gathered owners and usufruct holders, submitted written questions to the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Environment through parliamentary channels, sought meetings with the government, and taken the case into the public arena, holding protests outside parliament, with signs reading “Our land is not for sale” and “No to Industrial Colonialism.” Nabila Al-Hashoush, who is part of the committee and farms and lives on land slated for expropriation, has been at the forefront of media coverage of the threatened displacement of farmers, appearing recently on Nabd al-Balad, a local current-affairs talk show, alongside Laila Al-Sammarai, a lawyer and member of the South Jordan Valley Protection Committee, to debate MPs Dr. Aref Al-Saaydeh, Chair of the Parliamentary Legal Committee, and Dr. Ayman Al-Badadwa, a member of the Parliamentary Public Services and Transport Committee.
The debate centered on two competing understandings of “public benefit.” The MPs largely defended the legal and developmental rationale underpinning the railway and sought to distinguish the new Real Estate Law from the older concession framework governing the Arab Potash Company. They argued that infrastructure serving national transport and investment objectives could constitute a public benefit so long as expropriation followed the law and affected landholders receive fair monetary or land compensation. Al-Hashoush and Al-Sammarai challenged this reasoning from the perspective of the farmers whose land and livelihoods were at stake. Al-Sammarai questioned whether the destruction of productive agricultural land for investment, particularly where private or foreign corporate interests stood to benefit, could legitimately be subsumed under the constitutional concept of public benefit. Al-Hashoush grounded that legal critique in the material realities of the Jordan Valley, repeatedly rejecting the premise that the farmers’ losses could be reduced to the monetary value of their plots: “We don’t want to sell it,” she insisted, asking elsewhere, “Why do you want to get me out of my land?” When the discussion framed private investment and the expansion of the Arab Potash Company in terms of national benefit, Al-Hashoush responded pointedly, “Since when has a private corporation benefited the public good?”
This sentiment is shared by others in areas like Dana and Tafileh, where communities still deal with the fallout (economic and ecological) from the Lafarge Cement factory, a company whose own history includes supplying concrete to Nazi Germany’s Atlantic Wall during World War II. To this day, these communities continue to resist further extractive activities. Across Jordan, similar stories recur whereby economic development, green energy, conservation and heritage are framed as public goods, while complex land tenure recognition and weak governance allow private investments or state projects to deliver little or no material returns to the communities affected.
Beyond serving as a cover for land grabbing, these projects also reveal a deeper failure in planning and foresight especially around resource governance, domestic production, and sovereignty. What is alarming in Ghor, is the destruction of land –– and what it produces –– to allow the passage or the provision of a service whose national benefit is limited at best, defying basic development and economic logics. Highlighting this, Al-Hashoush juxtaposed the projected economic value of the railway and Potash expansion with the less easily financialized value of domestic agricultural production –– of food sovereignty.
Recalling the disruption of international food supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic, Al-Hashoush and Al-Sammarai argued that it was the farmers and agricultural production of the Jordan Valley that had helped sustain the Kingdom through the crisis.These lands are not merely real-estate assets awaiting their most profitable use, but instead productive infrastructure underpinning the Kingdom’s food security and even its political stability. From this perspective, the debate was not simply over whether farmers would be adequately compensated for expropriated land, but over what should be considered to serve the “public benefit” in the first place: the anticipated returns of transport infrastructure and corporate mineral development on one side, or the long-term social and strategic value of agricultural livelihoods, domestic food production, and the country’s capacity to feed itself on the other.
Conclusion
The controversy over the UAE-led railway in the Jordan Valley is one of many recent instances of state-facilitated seizure and financial speculation targeting agricultural land across Southwest Asia. This reflects the attempts of Gulf capital to shore up disruptions to US- and Israeli-led supply chains caused by the war on Iran. These recurring episodes are inseparable from the broader political questions and grievances that have animated the Arab world, particularly in the wake of the genocide in Gaza. The plight of the farmers of Ghor al-Safi and Fifa is not separate from the political grievances of the region’s urban masses — both reflect a stifled sense of subjecthood, in which the political and economic fates of the region’s people are subject to the whims of interests elsewhere, justified in the name of a benefit they are told to trust but never see. When Nabila al-Hashoush asks why the state wants her out of her own land, she is asking the same question that has echoed across the region’s capitals since October 7th: on whose terms, and for whose benefit, is this order being maintained.
This tense political-economic moment demands that we question the logic of developmentalism itself. State-led visions of facilitating further private investment across the region’s economies cannot be read as neutral acts of economic logic. They are part of a conscious, coordinated effort to reshape the region’s socioeconomic and infrastructural fabric, an attempt to salvage a US-Israeli-led political-economic vision — the Abraham Accords framework — that has been shattered since the unfolding genocide in Gaza. What we are witnessing in these recurring, haphazard, and often violent land grabs across the region is not economic rationalism operating under the banner of “public benefit.” It is the desperate flailing of a US hegemonic order in its death throes.