Arid lands are distributed throughout the globe, where aridity is climate phenomenon specific to water scarcity. Arid lands countries are mostly located in Asia, Africa, Australia and Middle East regions. Arid lands can be divided based on the climatic variations (mainly temperature and rainfall) and aridity index (Precipitation-P/Potential evapotranspiration-PET that is P/PET), a numerical indicator of aridity. In general, deserts have arid climates and constitutes about 35% of the land areas of the world and are typically characterized by rainfall scarcity, higher temperatures and evapotranspiration, prolonged droughts, lower humidity, and a general paucity of vegetation cover. Based on the aridity index (AI) four subtypes of drylands covering a total of 47.2% global land area are classified, hyper-arid (AI < 0.05), arid (0.05 < AI < 0.2), semiarid (0.2 < AI < 0.5), sub-humid (0.5 < AI < 0.65). Based on the rainfall, arid lands receive annual rainfall (0–300 mm) and semi-arid (300 to 600 mm). Arid regions occupy area of about 28 million km2 and semi-arid about 46 million km2, and is home to approximately 2.5 billion people and occupy 41% of the Earth’s land surface. Sustaining crop production to feed escalating population in arid regions is challenge due to water scarcity, high temperature and low rainfall. Long term disruption of rainfall will have far reaching impacts on food security in arid regions especially in Africa. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios of rising temperature has established that there are more chances of crop yield decrease than increase over the twenty-first century. Therefore, the governments have to develop soil and water conservation policies to sustain and intensify domestic crop production. To be sustainable in food security in the arid lands the governments must support farmers (training, provision of timely inputs and marketing of commodities to avoid wastage) that could have potential implications for their country’s food security. In addition, deals have to be developed with net food exporter countries to bridge the gap between domestic food production and local population food demand.