jobs are employed by the government, but the International Monetary Fund has warned that the government cannot support such a large payroll in the long term. The government has announced a succession of plans since 2000 to deal with the imbalance by "Saudization" of the economy, but the foreign workforce and unemployment has continued to grow. Since the beginning of 2017, however, Saudi Arabia has seen record numbers of foreign workers leaving the country as the Saudi government imposed higher fees on expatriate workers, with more than 677,000 foreigners leaving the kingdom. This has done little to lower the unemployment rate, which rose to 12.9 percent, the highest on record. One obstacle is social resistance to certain types of employment. Jobs in service and sales are considered totally unacceptable for citizens of Saudi Arabia—both to potential employees and customers. Non-petroleum resources sector Saudi Arabia has natural resources other than oil, including small mineral deposits of gold, silver, iron, copper, zinc, manganese, tungsten, lead, Sulphur, phosphate, soapstone and feldspar. The country has a small agricultural sector, primarily in the southwest where annual rainfall averages . The country is one of the world's largest producers of dates. For some years it grew very expensive wheat using desalinated water for irrigation, but plans to stop by 2016. As of 2009, the livestock population amounted to 7.4 million sheep, 4.2 million goats, half a million camels and a quarter of a million cattle. Although the jobs created by the roughly two million annual hajj pilgrims do not last long, the hajj employs more people than the oil industry—40,000 temporary jobs (butchers, barbers, coach drivers, etc.)—and generates US$2–3 billion in revenue. In 2008, the "Initiative for Saudi Agricultural Investment Abroad" was launched, leading to extensive billion-dollar purchases of large tracts of land around the world: Ethiopia, Indonesia, Mali, Senegal, Sudan and others. Critics see cases of land-grabbing in various instances that also lead to uproars in the respective countries. Competing industrialising nations with food security problems in the quest for agricultural land are China, South Korea and India as well as the Persian Gulf States Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE. In 2016, Mohammad bin Salman announced Saudi Vision 2030, a plan to reduce Saudi Arabia's dependence on oil, diversify its economy, and develop public service sectors such as health, education, infrastructure, recreation and tourism. Real estate One of the fastest growing sectors in the country