In a global marketplace, the UAE can easily trade its own resources for those of other countries
Water is quite simply the stuff of life, the most vital element to keeping all of us alive. And yet most people do not hoard it – go into any home and there may only be a few boxes of water at most, enough for a week or so, were supplies to run out. Rather, most people, correctly, rely on there being water when they need it, either from the tap or available to buy in the shops.
That is a good analogy to understanding food security. Rather than hoarding food or seeking to ensure that the country produces sufficient food itself, it is far better to seek to ensure that the global food market works, so that food is there when countries need it. This particularly applies to the UAE, which lives in an environment that makes agriculture difficult or, at least, resource intensive.
This was the view of the owner of a national supermarket chain, Wisal Ahmed of the Alam Group, as reported yesterday in The National. Food security for the UAE and the GCC, he said, rests on international trade.
That is correct, and a glance back at the greatest food crisis of recent times confirms that the market is the best solution. In late 2007 and early 2008, there was a spike in world food prices, which caused concern, instability and riots in many countries around the world. In the Middle East, it was the big, poor countries such as Egypt and Yemen that felt the crisis most.
The causes of the crisis have been long debated and there remains little consensus. But there is agreement on one aspect: the spike in prices was not caused by a lack of supply, only by inefficiencies in the market. That means that there was plenty of food around, but the market was not working properly. In at least some Asian countries, this was because companies and governments stockpiled food, hoping to sell it for higher prices.
In other words, the crisis of food had nothing to do with a lack of food. If the market had worked, there would have been no crisis. Indeed, stockpiling food was part of the cause. That is good news for the UAE, because of its healthy financial position – in a global marketplace, we can easily trade our financial resources for food resources.
