Baladna: $3.5 Billion in Milk at the Heart of the Adrar Sahara

Ahmed Cheikh — Nouakchott, Mauritanie — 2026-09-06

It took nerve. Planting at the heart of the Sahara, in Adrar, a complex that its promoters bill as the world's largest integrated dairy agro-industrial project. Baladna Algeria — the Qatari group Baladna and Algeria's National Investment Fund — has done it: the final agreement was signed on 28 March 2025 in Algiers, across 117,000 hectares, for an announced investment of $3.5 billion.

The figures are dizzying — and that is exactly what we like: figures. On 23 April 2026, a second batch of contracts worth more than $635 million was signed in the presence of the Minister of Agriculture, Yacine El-Mahdi Oualid — livestock, civil engineering, a concrete batching plant, housing. A few weeks later, on 4 May 2026, the giant farm brought in its first experimental barley harvest on 300 hectares of pivot-irrigated land at Tamest. The desert is no longer a void: it is a construction site.

At full capacity, the complex is to field 270,000 Holstein dairy cows — 30,000 of them imported from the United States from November 2026 via an air bridge of 109 flights — and produce 1.7 billion liters of milk plus nearly 198,000 tonnes of milk powder a year, enough to cover about half of Algeria's needs. The first powder is expected by the end of 2027, with the plant entrusted to German giant GEA. It is a direct answer to an import bill that the FAO puts at an average of 431,270 tonnes of dairy products bought abroad every year between 2020 and 2024, worth about $1.61 billion.

For Algerians, the project promises around 5,000 jobs — and as early as September 2026, its subsidiary Baladna El Djazaïr was already hiring 1,000 employees for the Adrar plant. For the foreign investor, Adrar is a message: Algeria offers land and incentives — the deal provides for a ten-year tax exemption and a twenty-year offtake contract with ONIL — and it honors its commitments. For the diaspora, it is proof: your country is turning its deserts into assets. To those still in doubt, come and see the cows — they never read the pessimistic editorials.