Veggies from High Tech Farms Help Desert Residents

Over the past decade, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been focusing more and more on high-tech agriculture to provide more local produce to its residents – an effort that’s paying off more than ever amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

80% of food is imported in this desert nation, according to Ismahane Elouafi, director general of the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA), so when the lockdown kicked off in April, residents began panic-buying in fears of stores running out of stock. But shelves remained full, added Elouafi, partly thanks to policies already in place that guarantee an uninterrupted supply of imported food, with more resilience in place since the country began growing its focus on vertical farming and climate-resilient crops.

“Thanks to the work being done to harness the benefits of innovation, agriculture is becoming possible and profitable in a country with harsh climatic conditions,” says Elouafi.

Over the past four years, the country has been growing more and more of its own organic tomatoes. It’s also gone from having 50 hydroponic farms – growing plants with nutrient-infused water instead of soil – in 2009, to over 1,000 today. This only marks a couple examples of the UAE’s food resilience efforts, complementing its mission to be ranked number one on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Food Security index by 2050, up from its current ranking of 21 out of 113 countries.