The Harvest Is Theirs: How Gulf States Buy Other Nations’ Food
The land belongs to Africa and South Asia. The food belongs to Abu Dhabi.
The language is always the same. Partnership. Investment. Mutual benefit. Food security. When a Gulf sovereign wealth fund signs a 25-year lease on a hundred thousand hectares of Ethiopian or Sudanese or Pakistani farmland, the press releases are indistinguishable from development aid communiques. The terminology has been calibrated over two decades to sound like generosity rather than extraction. It is not generosity. It is the architecture of a new agricultural empire, built not with flags and gunships but with long-term leases, sovereign guarantees, and the quiet purchase of the companies that move food across the world.
The Gulf Cooperation Council, a bloc of six states, imports 85 percent of its total food consumption. The UAE alone imports 90 percent. In 2024, imports accounted for 85 percent of total food consumption across the GCC, including 90 percent of cereals, 100 percent of rice, and 60 percent of meat. The Arabian Peninsula has almost no arable land. World Bank figures show that the GCC has among the lowest proportion of arable land in the world, ranging from 0.2 percent of the total land area in Oman to 2.1 percent in Bahrain, compared to above 30 percent for many European countries and above 40 percent for some countries in Africa. The problem is not new. The response to it is.
After the 2008 global food price crisis, Gulf states made a structural decision. They would not grow food at home. They would grow it somewhere else, on someone else’s land, using someone else’s water, and ship the harvest back. The farmers whose fields they leased, and the communities who had farmed those fields for generations, were not consulted. They were relocated.
The UAE’s Global Farm
The United Arab Emirates did not become a food security power by farming the desert. It became one by buying the companies, the land, and the logistics chains that feed the world, then securing diplomatic guarantees that the food would keep flowing to Abu Dhabi regardless of what was happening to anyone else.
When the UAE government bought 45 percent of the Louis Dreyfus Company in 2020, one of the world’s five largest commodity trading houses, a side agreement was signed guaranteeing food shipments to the UAE in times of supply crises. Louis Dreyfus handles grains, oilseeds, rice, and sugar on a scale that governs entire national diets. When Pakistan banned onion exports in 2024 to protect its own domestic market during a price spike, the UAE secured an exemption. When India moved to restrict food exports, the UAE negotiated around it. In Pakistan, the new investment law reportedly provides a sovereign guarantee that UAE investors will be able to continue their food security projects despite any change of leadership in the country. A change of government in Islamabad cannot touch the harvest. The guarantee is written into law.
On the ground, UAE agribusiness has built an operational footprint across Africa that functions less like investment than occupation. The Abu Dhabi company Al Dahra operates more than 260,000 hectares in Egypt, producing cereals and fruits. Jenaan has holdings of over 52,000 hectares of fruits, dairy farms, and fodder crops in the same country. In Sudan, the picture is larger and darker. Two Emirati firms, International Holding Company and Jenaan, are farming over 50,000 hectares in Sudan. In 2022, a deal was signed between IHC and the DAL group to develop an additional 162,000 hectares of farmland in Abu Hamad, in the north. This farm project, backed by the UAE government, will connect to a brand-new port on the coast of Sudan, built and operated by the Abu Dhabi Ports Group, bypassing the existing port of Sudan, which is run by the Sudanese government.
Sudan is in the third year of a civil war. Over eight million people have been internally displaced. Farmland has been destroyed, supply routes severed, equipment looted. UN experts have noted that the displacement of farmers who can no longer cultivate their land has contributed to a cycle of agricultural collapse, hunger, and escalating violence due to competition and scarcity of resources. As farms are destroyed, food supplies diminish, pushing more people into famine. While that famine deepens, the UAE is building a port to ship Sudanese grain to Abu Dhabi.
The two facts do not contradict each other. They are the same fact.
Ethiopia: “We Will Invite Investors”
In Ethiopia’s Gambella region, on the western edge of the country where it borders Sudan, the government told farmers something in 2011 that was honest in its brutality. During the government’s initial meeting with one village, officials told residents: “We will invite investors who will grow cash crops. You do not use the land well. It is lying idle.”
The farmers were not given a choice. Human Rights Watch documented that the Ethiopian government under its villagization program was forcibly relocating approximately 70,000 indigenous people from the Gambella region to new villages that lacked adequate food, farmland, healthcare, and educational facilities. State security forces repeatedly threatened, assaulted, and arbitrarily arrested villagers who resisted the transfers. The program’s name was a bureaucratic one: villagization. What it described was the forced removal of people from land that foreign investors wanted. From 2008 through January 2011, Ethiopia leased out at least 3.6 million hectares of land, an area the size of the Netherlands. In Gambella, 42 percent of the total land area was either being marketed for lease to investors or had already been awarded to investors, according to government figures.
Human Rights Watch titled its 2012 report on what was happening in Gambella: “Waiting Here for Death.” An elder in the region told researchers: “We want you to be clear that the government brought us here to die, right here.”
In Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley, the Oakland Institute documented displacement, acute hunger, and increased violent conflict, where communities lost essential farmland and grazing land as a result of a dam and sugarcane plantation projects. Food insecurity, famine, and malnutrition have blighted agropastoralist communities in the region. The Oakland Institute’s field research found that the promise of development, employment, and infrastructure transfer was a fiction. A study considering 150 land acquisitions showed that 130 of them offered fewer than 50 full-time equivalent work positions. Communities were moved to areas with inappropriate living conditions in terms of nutrition, health, farmland, and education.
The same study noted that Ethiopia approved 815 foreign-financed agricultural projects between 2007 and 2012. The land was leased for approximately one dollar per year per 2.5 acres. This is not the price of partnership. It is the price of vacancy, applied to land that was not vacant.
Pakistan: Sovereign Guarantee, No Sovereignty
Pakistan’s arrangement with Gulf investors is the most formally documented case of a government legislating away its own agricultural sovereignty. It happened quietly, and it happened fast.
In December 2023, immediately after the Pakistan government established the Special Investment Facilitation Council, a civil-military hybrid body designed to attract and expedite Gulf capital, the UAE signed $25 billion worth of deals, including in agriculture, beginning with halal meat and date palm production for export to the UAE. In May 2024, on a single-day visit to Abu Dhabi, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif secured a $10 billion investment commitment from UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed. The speed of these transactions, their scale, and the legal structures protecting them from future political change reflect an understanding on both sides of what, exactly, is being transferred.
From the outset, Pakistan made its priorities clear to its Gulf investors: their investments in Pakistani farmland would prioritise the investors’ own food security above Pakistan’s. This is not a characterization by critics. It is the agreed framework.
What grows on Pakistani soil under this framework goes to the Gulf. A business-to-business agreement was signed between Pakistan’s SIFC and the Saudi Najd Gateway Holding Company in the livestock sector, where 2,023 hectares of land in Bakkhar, Pakistan, will be used for alfalfa cultivation, with plans for export to Saudi Arabia to feed its dairy cows. Saudi dairy company Al Marai was also invited to join the venture. The same company that stands accused of diverting Colorado River water in drought-stricken Arizona to grow alfalfa for its dairy operations is now doing the same in Punjab. FonGrow, the company run by the Pakistan Army to facilitate joint corporate farming between itself and the Pakistani government, attracted Saudi companies including Al-Dahara, Saleh, and Al-Khorayef to invest in Pakistan’s agriculture.
By January 2025, over 44,000 hectares across Sindh and Punjab had quietly changed hands and been absorbed into the Green Pakistan Initiative: 20,285 hectares in Sindh, over 18,000 hectares in Bhakkar, Khushab, and Sahiwal, and another 5,600 hectares in the Umerkot district. Farmers filed lawsuits. Landless peasants backed by the Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee and Anjuman Mazareen Punjab held press conferences. They called the transfers what they are: the consolidation of corporate farming infrastructure built on land that small farmers and agricultural workers depended on for survival.
Earlier rounds of Gulf investment in Pakistan’s farmland followed a pattern established before 2010: the Pakistani government offered tax exemptions, duty-free equipment imports, 100 percent land ownership in agricultural free zones, exemption from the country’s labor laws, and reportedly even offered to provide a 100,000-strong security force to protect investors. The army would protect the harvest. The harvest would go abroad.
The Language of Investment, The Logic of Extraction
The institutional framework supporting these arrangements is not hidden. The World Bank has published detailed land governance reports tracking large-scale acquisitions. The FAO has provided data on Gulf food import dependency. FAO representatives urged GCC countries to undertake multi-billion dollar agro-investments and to buy up farmland in regions like the Horn of Africa and Asia in order to curb supermarket prices at home. The international development architecture did not merely observe the land grab. It recommended it.
In Zambia, Gulf investors have been looking at outright acquisitions of farms worth $200 million and above, with a focus on grains, sugar, beans, and seed production, as well as dairy and goat farming. A local property valuer explained: “They want to produce it here, take it to the Gulf, and then store it for 20 years or more to boost food security.” Many of the wealthiest investors seek discretion above all, and usually strike deals through local fixers who organize investments through special purpose vehicles.
The discretion is engineered. The indirectness is structural. When the beneficial owner of a Zambian grain operation is a UAE sovereign wealth fund operating through a Mauritius-registered special purpose vehicle under a 25-year lease negotiated by a local intermediary, the land grab is difficult to document, let alone challenge. The Oakland Institute, GRAIN, and Human Rights Watch have built the evidentiary record across two decades. The policy response from host governments has ranged from indifference to active complicity.
In Sudan, Gulf-backed farmland projects have collided with political instability, leaving swathes of land idle while communities wait in limbo. In Kenya, a proposed Qatari lease of 100,000 hectares sparked outrage for appearing to trade national farmland for infrastructure promises. In communities adjacent to leased farmland in Kenya, local people have reported greater food insecurity and the effects of environmental pollution from pesticide use. The investment narrative held that Gulf capital would increase African agricultural productivity and feed both regions. What the field research found was that communities adjacent to foreign-operated farms were hungrier than before the investors arrived.
What the Guarantee Forecloses
The term food security, as used by Gulf states and their institutional partners, describes the security of the Gulf. It does not describe the security of Ethiopia, Sudan, Pakistan, Kenya, or Zambia. It describes the guaranteed flow of calories from those countries’ soils to GCC populations, enforced by legal agreements insulated from local political change and backed, in Pakistan’s case, by the army itself.
GCC countries import up to 85 percent of their food. Despite this, the 2022 Global Food Security Index ranks all six GCC states in the top 50 globally for food security, reflecting their wealth and strategic import policies. The index measures access, not source. A country whose food supply is guaranteed by sovereign contracts signed with poorer states, enforced by the institutional architecture of those states’ own governments, scores well on food security indices. The people whose land produced that food do not appear in the index at all.
Pakistani smallholders, landless peasants, and civil society groups have been clear: the production of cash crops under these arrangements will fulfil other countries’ food security needs, not Pakistan’s. They have called for comprehensive agrarian reforms, with land distributed among landless peasants, agricultural workers, and small-scale farmers. The government’s push for corporate farming continues.
In Gambella, an elder told a Human Rights Watch researcher that the government had brought his people to a new village to die. In Sudan, UN experts report that the displacement of farmers has produced a cycle of agricultural collapse and famine. In Pakistan’s Sindh and Punjab, 44,000 hectares of farmland that fed local communities now feeds Saudi dairy cows.
The food travels north. The hunger stays.
Sources
Reuters, Gulf states vs global farmland, multiple reports
Human Rights Watch, “Waiting Here for Death: Forced Displacement and Villagization in Ethiopia’s Gambella Region,” January 2012
GRAIN, “From Land to Logistics: UAE’s Growing Power in the Global Food System,” 2024
UN FAO, Food Security Profiles, Gulf country import/export data
World Bank, Land Governance Reports, large-scale land acquisitions globally
Oakland Institute, Ethiopia land grab reports, 2011 onwards
Via Campesina, “Gulf Investors In, Locals Out: Pakistan’s Corporate Farming Agenda,” August 2025
Middle East Institute, “Agrarian Mirage: Gulf Foreign Direct Investment in Pakistan’s Agricultural Sector”
OHCHR, Sudan Humanitarian Situation Report, April 2025
Cairo Review of Global Affairs, “Seeds of Gulf-Africa Agribusiness,” 2020
AGBI, “Gulf Powers Bet Big on Africa in Food Security Race,” October 2025
French Ministry of Agriculture, “Food Security: Ambitions, Paradoxes and Strategies of the Gulf Countries,” 2025