The scramble by Gulf states to secure strategic food supplies by buying up vast tracts of farmland in Africa and Asia won't be enough to stave off a surge of food imports over the next decade, a Saudi bank report said. “The era of cheap food is over,” NCB Capital, the investment arm of Saudi Arabia's National Commercial Bank, said in the report issued several weeks ago. The wholesale investment in arable land in Sudan, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and other African states won't prevent the level of food imports of the six Gulf Cooperation Council states from rising sharply over the next decade. The NCBC report urged the GCC states to boost domestic food production through sustainable agriculture to head off an eventual crisis caused by a dramatic surge in the global demand for food that will push prices ever upward. It said that the Saudis at least are providing financial incentives to expand the use of new crop technologies, water management and new types of seeds that require less water. Kingdom's 2010 budget allocates $12.3 billion to the agriculture and water sectors, a 31 percent increase over 2009. New desalination plants are also planned. Even so, NCBC noted, “food inflation … represents a potentially considerable social-economic risk which the authorities are poorly equipped to deal with.” As populations expand while the amount of farmland and water supply shrinks, resource wars are expected to erupt across the Middle East and Africa in the decades ahead. “Unchecked land-grabbing carries with it the seeds of conflict, environmental disaster, political and social change, and hunger on an unprecedented scale,” Le Monde Diplomatique warned in February. Apart from soaring food prices, the GCC states will be further troubled by “the rising demand for biofuels and climate change,” NCBC stressed. Changes in weather patterns will reduce food production in some of the planet's main food-exporting states, such as the United States, Canada, Europe and Southeast Asia as well as reduce water supply. It noted that prices for maize and similar crops have soared because of the demand for biofuels and farmers, particularly in the United States, are switching from growing wheat and rice to cultivating feedstocks. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that 75 percent of the additional 40 million tons of maize grown worldwide in 2007 was taken up by plants producing ethanol for fuel.
