FOOD SECURITY

It is assumed by most people in the rich world that if you have money you will be able to feed yourself. In consequence, should you have a lot of money, you would be food secure.

This certainly applies to the Gulf States for the good reason that they are extremely rich and are therefore able to buy from various parts of the world, including Brazil, China, and India. But here we have an interesting twist in the story.

Whilst the elites in the Gulf states (this argument can be extended to Saudi Arabia itself) enjoy food security, the situation for the vast majority of the population of the UAE is much more acute. It has been estimated that close to 90% of the population of the UAE is made up of migrant workers.

These people are badly treated in all manners one could possibly imagine. They are recruited in extremely poor countries like Nepal, India, Bangladesh, and have to sign contracts in languages they do not understand because they are drafted in languages different to their own or because they simply cannot read.

Under such contracts they are obliged to pay the recruiting agency placement fees, reimburse them for the transport, cede their passport on arrival, put to work in temperatures regularly easily over 40°C and put in accommodation that by any standard is sub-optimal.

They are paid a pittance and are deprived of all rights. These migrant workers are the people who have built the physical infrastructure of most of the countries in the region but because they're paid and treated so badly the result is that they have less access to food than the richer members of the same countries.

This does not prevent the Football World Cup from being declared a success after having been played in Qatar in 2022. The ILO, the United Nations agency that represents both employers and trade unions, has regularly condemned the situation of such workers in that part of the world.

The response from the authorities is that improvements are part of the work in progress.

This is where one wonders about the level of hypocrisy of countries that do not feed their own people but allow for the commercial sale of foodstuff to other parts of the world simply because they have the money to purchase that food.

It is an additional reason for the poorest countries in Africa to fear because the lack of food in the Middle East is not just made up from high proportion of imports from distant parts of the world, but also from investments in land that has been purchased either by the sovereign funds of the Gulf countries (but also by others acting on their behalf).

According to GIS (Geographic Information System) Africa has about 65% of all unused arable land across the world. As I have tried to explain in my book, the lack of secure legislation on land tenure and land ownership across the continent means that anybody with ready money and with the power to attract the local elites to their side, means that the poorest are seriously at risk of starvation.

If you do not stand for the weakest, the subsistence farmers, you allow starvation to continue.