Egypt

The UAE is actively looking at acquiring farmland in Vietnam, Cambodia, Africa and South America in an effort to ensure the availability of food stocks, according to the UAE Minister of Economy.

Globalisation has taken yet another twist with some Middle Eastern countries deciding to grow their crops in other countries.

The Dubai-based think-tank Gulf Research Centre, in its food inflation report released last month, noted that agriculture production in the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) countries is on the decline, and its exposure to unstable global food supplies would increase in the future. It called on the GCC to develop links with countries rich in arable land.

Leasing farms on contract in Arab countries such as Iraq, Egypt and Sudan might be an option to deal with severe shortage of agriculture lands and water in Bahrain.

The UAE and its food-importing neighbours are “particularly vulnerable” to spiralling costs and should make significant investments in “contract farming” in Africa and Asia, says the UN’s Gulf food chief, Dr Kayan Jaff.

Saudi Arabia has unveiled plans to develop large-scale overseas agricultural projects to secure food supplies, revealing that Riyadh is in discussions with Ukraine, Pakistan, Sudan, Turkey and Egypt.

As food crisis worsens, some nations are desperate for arable land

To break the runaway inflation that is fuelled by high food costs, Gulf rulers have a new strategy: they are buying unused agricultural land in poor countries like Pakistan, Thailand and Sudan, and becoming large-scale farmers.

Gulf oil producers need to set up agricultural projects in fertile Arab countries to achieve self-sufficiency and to bridge a massive farm deficit that exceeded $12 billion (Dh44bn) in 2006, a Gulf group said yesterday.

“Buying farms is not a bad thing,” Panos Konandreas, acting director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Geneva, said in a telephone interview. “If you are like Saudi Arabia and have all the resources in the world, you can help farms optimize their strategies and there will be more production.”

UAE wants to boost investment in Egypt’s agricultural sector in the light of the current rise in prices of commodities worldwide.

The Moroccan government has pursued a strategy of leasing state-farms previously under the management of Société de Développement Agricole (SODEA). A large number of bids were made by agricultural businesses from France, Egypt, Spain and the United Arab Emirates.