The Gulf's Quiet Farmland Grab: How the UAE Built a 960,000-Hectare Agricultural Empire

The numbers are striking. In just over fifteen years, the United Arab Emirates has accumulated control over roughly 960,000 hectares of agricultural land worldwide, according to reporting by Middle East Eye. The acquisitions span three continents: Africa, South America, and Europe. What began as a series of bilateral deals signed during Gulf Cooperation Council summits has become one of the most systematic foreign land-grabbing campaigns in the Global South.

The scale demands attention. Nearly a million hectares is roughly the size of Crete—or, for comparison, seven times the total arable land area of the UAE itself. That a desert state with negligible domestic agricultural capacity has built such an empire abroad speaks to a strategic calculation that goes well beyond commercial farming. It speaks to food security as national security, pursued aggressively and with sovereign wealth backing.

A Strategy Rooted in Vulnerability

The UAE's hunger for foreign farmland is not irrational. The Gulf states, the UAE included, face a structural problem: they can produce hydrocarbons in abundance but cannot grow enough food to feed their populations. The UAE imports roughly 80 to 90 percent of its food, according to World Bank and FAO data cited across multiple analyses. That dependency was thrown into sharp relief during the 2008-2009 food price crisis, when export restrictions from major grain producers threatened supplies to import-dependent states. Gulf capitals noticed. Some, like Saudi Arabia, phased out domestic wheat production to conserve water while accelerating overseas land investment. The UAE appears to have pursued a parallel track with greater ambition.

The 960,000-hectare figure represents not a single deal but a cumulative portfolio assembled through state-owned enterprises, sovereign wealth vehicles, and private agribusiness firms with government ties. The specifics of which companies hold which assets in which countries are not fully transparent—the land deals have often been negotiated quietly, outside public scrutiny in host nations with weaker land registries and limited civil society capacity to track them. This opacity is itself significant: the very difficulty of tracking these acquisitions suggests a deliberate strategy to operate below the threshold of political controversy in target countries.

The African Footprint

Africa features prominently in the acquisition pattern. The continent offers what the Gulf needs—large tracts of underutilised arable land, relatively low land values, and governments often eager for foreign investment capital. For Gulf sovereign wealth funds, Africa also offers a geopolitical foothold, a way to extend influence beyond the immediate neighbourhood.

The terms of these deals have varied. Some involve outright purchase. Others are long-term leases, sometimes spanning fifty years or more. Many are structured around joint ventures with local partners—arrangements that give Gulf capital operational control while appearing to preserve national ownership on paper. Critics have labelled such structures "land-grabbing by another name." The counterargument, advanced by Gulf governments and some development economists, is that these investments bring capital, infrastructure, and agronomic expertise to countries that desperately need all three.

Both framings contain partial truth. The question is which partial truth better describes the outcome on the ground—and that question cannot be answered without transparency that currently does not exist for most of these deals.

The Food Sovereignty Reckoning

For African governments that have signed these agreements, the calculus has typically been: foreign investment in exchange for development. But the record is uneven. Studies of large-scale land acquisitions in sub-Saharan Africa have documented cases where local communities lost access to grazing land and water, where promised employment failed to materialise, and where the crops grown were exported rather than consumed locally. Whether the UAE's specific deals have followed this pattern requires disaggregated country-by-country analysis that the available evidence does not fully support.

What is clear is the structural dynamic: a wealthy, food-insecure state with sovereign wealth backing is acquiring productive capacity in countries that are themselves food-insecure. This is not unique to the UAE—China, Saudi Arabia, and several other Gulf states have pursued similar strategies—but the UAE's pace and scale make it a leading case.

The geopolitical dimension is difficult to ignore. As climate change intensifies water scarcity across the MENA region, and as global food supply chains face increasing disruption from extreme weather events, the countries that control agricultural production assets abroad will have a structural advantage. Land in Sudan or Mozambique, producing wheat or soybeans or palm oil, becomes a strategic reserve in a way that money in a sovereign wealth fund cannot be. The UAE appears to have understood this before many of its peers.

What Remains Unresolved

The available evidence does not allow a definitive assessment of whether the UAE's land acquisitions have benefited or harmed host communities on balance. The geographic distribution of the 960,000 hectares—by country, by crop, by lease versus ownership structure—is not fully public. The thread linking Gulf state investment to outcomes on the ground requires more granular data than the source material provides.

What can be said with confidence is that the UAE's farmland empire is real, that it is large, and that it is the product of a deliberate national strategy to insulate the country from global food market volatility. Whether that strategy comes at the expense of the communities and countries where the land is located is a question that deserves more investigative attention—and more transparency from Gulf capitals—than it has received so far.

This publication compared the Middle East Eye reporting on UAE farmland acquisition against publicly available FAO and World Bank food import dependency figures for Gulf states. The structural framing around food security as national security strategy aligns with the pattern visible across Gulf Cooperation Council members over the past two decades.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://x.com/middleeasteye/status/1930485348963086616