Food Security in the United Arab Emirates; the Role of the State in Overseas Farm Crops Production

Saif S. Al Qaydi

Asian Journal of Agricultural Extension, Economics & Sociology, 2014, vol. 3, issue 6

Abstract: With its increasing population and continuing rapid infrastructural development in order to deal with international events such as Expo 2020, The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has created a pull-in environment for a large international labor force eager to work and settle down in the country. Food security has become an important issue as a result of the population growth and the labour force increase. The aim of this paper is to review and analyze a number of approaches, which could point the way to fostering policy options for achieving long term and sustainable food security for the UAE.Within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the UAE produces an extremely limited amount of its necessary foodstuffs, and as the UAE population increased from 557,000 in 1975 to over 8.5million at the end of 2012, and during that time the annual expenditure on food imports exceeded AED 41.7billion (Arab Emirate Dirham, 1 USD=3.67 Dirham). In fact the country depends almost entirely on imports, especially cereals. Rice, for example, is a vital staple primarily imported from India, Pakistan, Thailand and Vietnam.This paper focuses on the UAE alternatives to deal with food security by growing food in some friendly countries. Alternatives of 1) increasing food production locally; 2) direct importation; and 3) leasing farmland for food production in other friendly countries are examined to answer the main question raised in this paper.

Keywords: Food; Security; and; Poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/357447/files/Qaydi362014AJAEES11300.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:ajaees:357447

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Asian Journal of Agricultural Extension, Economics & Sociology from Asian Journal of Agricultural Extension, Economics & Sociology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().