Gulf Land Acquisitions in Egypt and Sudan: Food Security or the Agro-commodity Supply Chain?

Abstract

This chapter argues that over the last two decades a food-security discourse has emerged in the Middle East that has been sponsored and supported by the Gulf states. This manifests itself in the form of academic research and policy studies claiming to show that the Gulf states suffer greater food insecurity than other parts of the Arab region. Moreover, the rhetoric of food security is deployed in the acquisition of agricultural land by Gulf investors in Egypt and Sudan. These investments are sometimes portrayed as a ‘win-win’ situation that can benefit both the host country and the investor. However, evidence suggests that rather than being concerned with addressing the food security of Egypt, Sudan, or the Gulf states, these projects primarily represent a land base for commodities used by regional agro-industrial conglomerates owned by Gulf capital. The crops that are grown on these projects are used for the production of what can be described as “high-value, low nutrition foodstuffs” (Ayeb and Bush 2014), and their distribution is determined by the free market, rather than on the basis of ensuring universal food security. This chapter is based on interviews that were undertaken in Egypt in 2013.