Abu Dhabi wants to grow 70% of its basic food by 2040, and it’s counting on investors to foot a big part of the bill

When shipping through the Strait of Hormuz effectively stopped in March, the UAE learned how exposed its food supply is. Around 70% of the Gulf’s food imports pass through the strait, and the UAE imports 80-90% of its food. Iran, a large supplier to the UAE, banned food and agricultural exports indefinitely. Retailers kept shelves stocked at a higher cost by flying food in and rerouting shipments. Food security rose to the top of the government’s priority list, alongside defense and infrastructure.

Abu Dhabi’s answer is to grow much more of its own food and to have private investors pay for much of it. The Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority (Adafsa) wants the emirate to produce 70% of its basic food commodities at home by 2040, up from 30% today, while cutting farm water use to 12.7k cbm per hectare a year from 24.7k. Over the same period, it wants agriculture’s contribution to the economy to grow 3.6x to AED 34.6 bn from AED 9.5 bn, according to the strategy unveiled at the Global Food Security Summit last month.

“It’s a very ambitious target,” Leigh Mante, a junior climate and energy fellow at ORF Middle East, tells EnterpriseAM. “At the end of the day, you can’t produce everything within the context of this region. You’ll also still need to import.”

The strategy builds on a year of emergency measures. In April, ADQ’s Silal expanded its Ensure Essentials program and signed 14 supplier partnerships, and the federal government approved an AED 1 bn fund to localize staples like dairy, poultry, and flour. New trucking routes through Oman’s Sohar and Salalah kept cargo moving. The crisis “reinvigorated a desire to increase domestic self-sufficiency and domestic production,” Mante says.

Inside the strategy (and its challenges)

The strategy targets 25 products across six categories: vegetables, fruits, poultry, red meat, dairy, and fish, Zayed Salem Al Kathiri, acting executive director of Adafsa’s strategy and policy sector, tells EnterpriseAM. They were chosen for their share of the local diet, their nutritional value, and how realistic it is to produce them locally. Grains, rice, and edible oils are not included.

Red meat and dairy will be the hardest to produce locally, because both are water-intensive. “The UAE imports a lot of beef from Brazil or Australia, and they tend to produce the less water-intensive products in the country, like fruits and vegetables,” Mante says.

Water is the main constraint: “It’s still a very arid region with limited freshwater resources,” Mante says. Agriculture accounts for about 70% of Abu Dhabi’s groundwater use. Desalination supplies only 18% of farm water, and recycled water less than 1%. For decades, the Gulf has dealt with water scarcity by producing more water, mostly by building desalination plants. Adafsa’s target aims instead to make farms use less, and Mante sees that as progress. “Just the fact that they’re looking at cutting water use is a good signal,” she says.

The war also showed the risk of relying more heavily on desalination. In April, Iran threatened to hit desalination plants if the US attacked its power plants. A desalination plant in Bahrain had already been hit earlier in the conflict, and a power and water desalination plant in Kuwait was struck days later, though Iran denied responsibility and blamed Israel, we reported at the time.

The challenge is how they’ll save water. “Agritech is very energy-intensive, so there’s also an energy dimension that needs to be addressed in addition to the water one,” Mante says. The key is to plan water and energy together, with farms and industries sharing sites so water can be reused. “Integrated water management will become very important: having co-located industries and sectors where there’s a circular environment, where water is moved from one use to another and recycled internally,” she says. “Developing a circular economy for food and being able to balance this nexus of water, energy, and food is going to be very important, and it will require a lot of coordination and also government support.”

Even the right crops need fertilizer, and that supply came through the strait too. Granular urea prices rose USD 60 per ton after the strait effectively closed, we reported in March. The UAE and Oman are both exploring green ammonia as a local alternative. “This crisis has reinvigorated those efforts to expand green ammonia production specifically for fertilizer,” Mante says.

Where private capital comes in

Adafsa is counting on private capital for much of the 3.6x growth. Government spending will be redirected toward productivity gains and measurable results, and two of the strategy’s 13 programs focus on redirecting agricultural subsidies and on farm financing, Al Kathiri says. Investors are expected to co-invest in greenhouses, smart irrigation, and farm solar; to build and run assets from palm replanting to cold chains; and to sign guaranteed offtake agreements for dates, fruits, vegetables, and livestock.

The private share of the AED 34.6 bn target has not been set, but Adafsa has started talks with private-sector players, and investment volumes will be defined once each program’s public-private partnership (PPP) structure is finalized, Al Kathiri says.

Mante expects investors to favor the technologies that are easiest to sell. The priority should be “making sure that they’re not just investing in the flashy technologies, but also in what’s important, like drought-resistant seeds,” she says.

Grains aren’t on Adafsa’s list, but Mante thinks they could be grown here, just not with the technology that gets most of the attention. Vertical farms suit high-value fruit and vegetables, but “it’s not very cost-efficient to be producing grain in a vertical farm,” she says. Growing staples in the UAE’s heat and salty soil instead depends on crops bred for those conditions, like the higher-yield, drought- and salt-tolerant wheat varieties developed at Sharjah’s wheat farm. “Investing in these drought-resistant seed alternatives is going to help with domestic food production,” Mante says.

That research is slow to pay off, which is where the state comes in. Seed trials take years, and “there’s not going to be an immediate return on investment,” Mante says. “That’s why the public sector needs to come in and do the de-risking, so that the private sector can do the rest.” She also points to crop ins. and agri-guarantees for smallholder farmers, as well as shared food hubs that pool research, water, and energy infrastructure.

It’s not about ending imports

Adafsa’s new strategy is clear: It chooses its priority crops and varieties and focuses on increasing self-sufficiency for those — not trying to do everything at once.

Even at 70%, Abu Dhabi will still depend on imports, so diversified trading partners and backup routes are “equally as important” as domestic output, Mante tells us. She says the UAE’s comprehensive economic partnership agreements (CEPAs) could cut delays with faster customs clearance and single-window systems, which matters more when rerouted perishables are spending longer in transit. The UAE is also widening its partner list, including a food partnership with India and Africa and closer ties with Brazil. “There are partners that they wouldn’t have normally considered before that they’re starting to consider more now,” she says.

What’s next: Adafsa’s program-by-program PPP structures will be the first real test, showing how much private money is committed and where it goes. Water policy is also on the calendar. GCC states restarted talks on intra-regional water cooperation in August, Mante says. The UAE co-hosts the UN Water Conference with Senegal at Adnec in Abu Dhabi on 8-10 December, and Mante expects regional cooperation to come up.