UAE food insecurity, greed driving genocide in Sudan

Alameen Templeton

Isolated in a tiny scrap of sun-parched desert on the tip of the toe of the boot-shaped Arabian peninsula, the United Arab Emirates has always had to import about 90% of its food. And it is this food insecurity that is fuelling the genocide in Sudan.
Lines of causality linking the UAE to Sudan’s killing fields are to be seen in the billions of dollars in arms and assistance it is pressing on the RSF and in the focus of its investment activities in Sudan that date back to the 1970s – animal feed, crops and livestock.
And land. The tiny UAE is one of the largest investors in farm projects in Sudan, controlling around 291 000 hectares or 4 832 square kilometres of prime agricultural land in the war-torn country.
That’s nearly twice the size of the UAE’s agricultural land inside its own borders where just 3.1% of the arid country can yield crops of any sort, farmlandgrab.net reports.
Investments to protect
And it’s a considerable portion of the additional 960 000 hectares of land the Emirates have amassed since the 2007 world food crisis when it realised its perilous dependency on unreliable supply chains.
Now, the UAE is determined to protect those investments in Sudan, hence its support for the Rapid Support Forces, despite their pariah status in the world as genocidaires.

Middle East Eye reports the support “is ongoing despite the massive humanitarian toll on the Sudanese people, with over 750,000 at risk of starvation, at least 15,000 killed and more than 10.2 million displaced.

“(Experts believe) part of the UAE’s motivation for funding the devastating hostilities is to guarantee its access to Sudanese land, seaports, and mineral and agricultural resources, including livestock and crops.”

“The RSF is the UAE’s hand in Sudan,” Amgad Fareid Eltayeb, an analyst and former senior aide to Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, told MEE.

He says the UAE seeks to maintain the RSF’s institutional presence in Sudan to ensure that its influence over Sudanese politics continues and its long-term investments in the country remain intact.

Marooned in a hostile sea
Like Israel, the UAE is an artificial country created as a tiny “island of influence”, an “aircraft carrier”, designed as an artifice of 19th Century colonial ambitions to divide and rule Arabia.
The British and Americans kept military bases and permanent troops stationed in the UAE, which is a perfect a vantage point guarding the vast treasure trove of oil beneath UAE soil, off its coastline and in neighbouring “countries”. Like it, many of its neighbours are mere oilfields ringfenced at the 1925 Conference of Cairo behind ostensible border lines.
And their rulers are also dependent on “mutual defence agreements” with the West’s major powers to keep them in power.
It is the UAE’s struggles to escape the ties binding it to its historic origins of vassalage that are motivating its murderous involvement in Sudan.
Competitive advantage
Where it was once “surrounded and isolated”, Dubai has turned this drawback into a competitive advantage, transforming itself in the last two decades into a “transit hub” at the centre of global airline routes.
Emirates Airline has been the most visible symbol of this new-found success and place in the world.
But now its rulers have realised its central position and new role in transport routes is a competitive advantage that can be extended into logistics and supply chains. Now, it sees itself as a “disruptor” in the world’s agricultural products supply line and its food ambitions have geared up from need to greed.
“We are progressively moving forward in the disruption of food systems to be able to grow anything anywhere regardless of climate and environment,” is how the UAE government described its outlook in 2021, grain.org reports.
Stitching up upply chains
Then, global supply chains had been shattered by Covid lockdown regulations and the UAE has been carefully picking up the pieces and reweaving them into a worldwide net with Dubai at the centre.
The threads tie into its Food Security Strategy the UAE launched in 2018 when it announced its aim to see itself at Number One on the Global Food Security Index by 2051.
Ownership and its control of over 1.2 million hectares of land in various countries is a vital key in Dubai’s ambitions. After Sudan with 291 000 hectares of owned agricultural land, Egypt is its second-biggest target, where 210 000 hectares have been bought up.
These are followed by Sierra Leone Madagascar (60 000ha), Romania (54 000ha), Serbia (28 000ha), Spain (10 000ha) and the US (12 000ha).
World’s Number One
“Now, though, these global farm operations are increasingly being tied to the UAE through a tightly controlled network of ports and logistics platforms, all of which are entwined with security concerns,” grain.org notes.
It adds: “Moreover, the UAE’s long-term ambition is not only to become food self-sufficient, but also to become a central hub in the world’s changing agrifood trade system. This means becoming a critical shipping or airfreight point between Asia, Africa and Europe, with the technological capacity to move food safely and quickly. Given the UAE’s immense spending power and regulatory laxity – think of tax havens and free zones – towards international investors, it may just succeed.”
Industrial elite
Key actors in the scheme are often linked to the royal family and state foreign policy.
“The most powerful is surely the Abu Dhabi Developmental Holding Company or ADQ, one of the country’s sovereign wealth funds.[9] Several others are part of the industrial elite of the UAE,” grain.org reports.
And those ports are not small change.
Dubai Ports World and Abu Dhabi Ports Group are among the world’s top seaport operators, with an immense network of terminals around the planet.
These link back to the main ports of the UAE where Jebel Ali Port, run by the DP World, is the biggest and newest. It is in Jebel Ali where the UAE government is transforming the town into a vital transshipment port for global food trade.
Naked ambitions
While some of the relations with tied countries are comfortable, such as with Egypt, Dubai’s naked ambitions come to the fore in more isolated countries like Sudan.
UAE and Egypt have good political but very unequal economic ties. In 2024, the UAE group, Al Dahra, boasted that for three consecutive years it had been “the largest producer of Egypt’s most strategic crop: wheat.” The UAE is also financing Egypt’s wheat imports, underlining their interdependency. Given the strategic importance of Emirati control over ports on the Red Sea and Suez Canal, and its new concession on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, this dependency is likely to only grow.
The dark side of Dubai
But don’t mess with them.
“It’s another story in the Horn of Africa. In 2018, Djibouti kicked DP World out of the Doraleh Container Terminal, a port that is crucial for moving goods in and out of landlocked Ethiopia. Djibouti claimed that the agreement they had unfairly benefited DP World, so it cancelled the deal, nationalised the port and gave China a share instead. DP World then moved to Berbera in Somaliland, where in exchange for being allowed to run a port it promised to build a road to Hargeira, the capital, and to the border of Ethiopia. On top of this, the UAE is ruthlessly suing Djibouti in court for cancelling their deal and raking in enormous fees,” grain.org observes.
Further south, UAE food security corporations are carving space for themselves in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Uganda is reportedly taking advantage of the war in Sudan to become a new hub for UAE investment.
As Uganda is primarily an agricultural country, it can meet the UAE’s food needs and acquire technology to add value to Uganda’s agricultural produce, the Foreign Minister recently observed.
President Yoweri Museveni even signed a deal allowing the UAE to build an “agricultural free zone”, apparently a world first. The 2 500 ha park will process and ship food (sugar, tea, beef and maize) to the UAE.
Royal’s private game reserve
Recently, a member of the UAE royal family who is building a major oil refinery in Hoima, announced that he will supply seven cargo planes and open a cold storage centre in Entebbe to boost exports.
In Tanzania, the violent expulsion of 70 000 Maasai to make was for a game reserve to UAE royals is, like the under-reported Sudan genocide, still ongoing.
Meanwhile, major food deals have been signed in Kenya, Zimbabwe and Zambia, “with further expansion contingent on gaining access to more farmland,” grain.org writes.
“Thanks to a web of global free trade and tax agreements, traders in the UAE can import and re-export products quickly to other markets, without duties coming into the picture. This combination of logistical might and regulatory freedom make the UAE an attractive transshipment route,” it says.
Riba’s invisible hand
And it all goes hand-in-hand with the global riba industry that can reach even into the deepest, most inaccessible parts of Africa.
“the increasing pressure of climate change is being turned into a cover for Gulf States engaged in outsourced food production. The UAE, an increasing power in international climate discussions, has embraced carbon offsetting as a key path to greenwash its own formidable climate footprint. Carbon deals are being made right and left, especially in Africa, to keep forests intact or grow trees on rural territories so that credits can be sold to global polluters. And the new business of carbon farming can both help to fund the UAE’s overseas farms and offset its companies emissions. This new rush for carbon land deals will rob local communities of their food systems and local livelihoods in yet new and pernicious ways.”