Food security in the United Arab Emirates: External cereal supply risks

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have exposed the vulnerability of the food systems of import-dependent countries to supply chain disruptions. This study measured the short-term external cereal supply risks for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) by applying the Herfindahl–Hirschman Concentration Index (HHI) and the Shannon–Wiener Diversity Index (SWI) during 2012–2020. We measured the security of UAE’s external cereal supplies by taking the degree of UAE’s cereal import dependency, the level of political- and business-related risks of UAE’s cereal supplying countries, and the distance between UAE and its supplying countries into account. The results of the index values generally imply that UAE’s cereal external supply risk has been low during the sample period. However, the external wheat supply risk has increased since 2017. This was mainly attributable to UAE’s increasing dependence on less secured countries, i.e. countries with higher levels of risk assessment values such as Russia. UAE has heavily been dependent on one or two, mostly price competitive, sources for its cereal imports, which also raises the external cereal supply risk. The UAE’s increasing dependence on Russia as the main source of cereals and the increasing consolidation of sources pose a serious threat to sustaining food security.

Keywords:

• Cereals
• COVID-19
• food security
• import dependency
• risk
• United Arab Emirates

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The food import dependency rates of the GCC countries can be retrieved from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Food Security Index (GFSI) 2021 publication under the Natural Resources and Resilience dimension.

2. The unit prices are derived as import value divided by import quantity of a particular cereal type for a particular year.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no direct funding for this research.

Notes on contributors

Beshir M. Ali

Dr Beshir M. Ali is an applied/agricultural economist. He has obtained his PhD in 2018 from Wageningen University, the Netherlands. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wollongong in Dubai (UOWD), UAE. Before joining UOWD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University for two and half years. His research interest areas include circular food systems, sustainability assessment, (agricultural) production economics, analysis of adoption of sustainable practices and food security. He has (co)authored over ten peer-reviewed articles.

Ioannis Manikas

Dr Ioannis Manikas is Associate Professor in Logistics and Supply Chain Management at the University of Wollongong in Dubai. His work experience includes more than twenty years of experience working as an academic and consultant in Europe, the UAE, and in Central America. Until 2016, Dr Manikas was Principal Lecturer in Logistics and SCM and Director of Business Studies at the University of Greenwich, Department of Systems Management and Strategy. He has participated in a total of 16 research and consultancy projects, with most recent a project with a focus on Food Security and Supply Chain Resilience, and a project with a focus on Urban Food Production methods.

Balan Sundarakani

Dr. Balan Sundarakani is an Associate Professor in Logistics in the Faculty of Business at the University of Wollongong in Dubai (UOWD). Previously he was working as an Assistant Professor with UOWD (May 2009 - Aug 2011). He has 22 years of teaching and research experience in the area of Supply Chain Management across various universities including the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, Hindustan University, Chennai and the National University of Singapore, Singapore and the Chair of Logistics Management in Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland. Dr. Sundarakani has published 96 research papers in the form of refereed International Journals, Book chapters and Conference Proceedings, including International Journal of Production Economics, Computers in Industry, Competitiveness Review, International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications, The International Journal of Logistics Management, Benchmarking: An International Journal, Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, The TQM Journal etc.