This reminds me of Incorporated (TV series), with a similar idea of using the deserts for seawater adapted crops. This is so fascinating to see being developed in real life and even more so to be marveled at in an exercise of forecasting the changes it ought to bring into the world. Just to pick a few such changes, this how the deserts will suddenly start worth something (and offer new reasons to be fought over, unfortunately). This is also how dramatic demographic booms took place over the history, so expect UAE to growth several times its current number of inhabitants; or next to it, in Saudi Arabia, expect a growth to something on the order of hundreds of millions!