Mitigating Imported Vegetable Dependency in the United Arab Emirates through Indoor Farms: The Financial and Environmental Impact

Abstract

The world’s population is projected to increase by 30% in 2050, to 9.5 billion persons. This will require 60% more food to be produced than is done today, all in the face of inevitable increases in the price of water, energy, and agricultural resources. Such a stark picture mandates finding solutions outside conventional farming methods to ensure the survival of future generations (Al-Kodmany, 2018). Throughout the world, billions of dollars in subsidies for the traditional agriculture industry have been made by governments in order to protect consumers from food scarcity and rising prices (Goodman, 2015). Such a practice impedes innovation. New methods such as indoor farming could provide promising alternatives in support of increased global demand.

Indoor farming is the practice of growing produce in controlled hygienic environments powered by light-emitting diodes (LEDs). This practice marks a recent shift to applying techniques such as hydroponics, aquaponics, or aeroponics. The indoor farm concept is a novel way of growing produce that reduces water consumption and the use of pesticides and herbicides, while generating high quantities of nutritious, quality fresh food year-round. The technology is largely independent of weather conditions, thus providing a solution to an arid region’s future food security predicament. As a desert terrain country, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) struggles to produce its own food. This research, a first of its kind in the Middle East, addressed the critical question of whether the UAE government should shift its current emphasis on importing food (85% of its fruits and vegetable) to building its own food sources through systematized indoor farming. I hypothesized that indoor tomato farming would be more cost-effective by requiring lower operational yearly expenditures while generating higher profits than does the current process of importing tomatoes. My research targeted the environmental impacts of both conventional open-field farming and importing tomatoes to the UAE, versus supplying these from domestic indoor farms. A second and related hypothesis was that indoor farming would have a lower environmental impacts.

To test these hypotheses, I quantified the environmental impacts of both the import model and that of in-house indoor farming by pursuing a comprehensive literature review in addition to working with a farm in the UAE to gather necessary data. I then built economic and life-cycle assessment models to measure the economic and environmental impacts, respectively, of both approaches. Last, I applied a sensitivity analysis to the environmental model by looking at an alternative energy source, photovoltaics (PV), for indoor farms, and an alternative growing scenario, heated greenhouses, for imported tomatoes. While results revealed both environmental disadvantages and advantages of the indoor farming of tomatoes over importing them, nevertheless, the current structure of indoor farms and their projected profitability based on a variety of loan schemes and periods showed that over the long term (15 years), they are a more profitable business venture than the import model.

This study will likely be of value to UAE government policymakers, to entrepreneurs thinking of starting an indoor farm and to the UAE’s sustainability and food security plans, and to environmentalists broadly. While this study is aimed at the UAE, it certainly applies to other countries—especially those in the Gulf Cooperation Council with desert regions that are heavily dependent on food imports.