Reviving Gaza’s fishing sector hinges on restoring peace and safe access to the sea

When Hamas Palestinians attacked Israel they wouldn’t image this would lead to such a collapse of Gaza’s once thriving fishing sector. The situation could still be reversed quickly when peace is restored and fishers are granted safe access to fishing waters, along with the resumption of imports of essential fish production inputs and tools, says the UN’s FAO.

The impact of the ongoing escalation on the fishing sector is devastating, according to the UN. Gaza’s average daily catch between October 2023 to April 2024 dropped to just 7.3 percent of 2022 levels, causing a $17.5 million production loss.

The destruction of Gaza’s two main aquaculture farms, along with the hatchery facility, has also left the sector unable to produce alternative aquatic foods through aquaculture. According to one assessment, before the conflict over 6 000 individuals in Gaza, including 4,200 registered fishers and boat owners, relied on fishing as their main income. The sector supported around 110,000 people.

North of Wadi Gaza, which separates the northern and southern parts of the Strip, the Port of Gaza City has been severely damaged, with most fishing boats destroyed.

The damage to  Gaza’s fishing sector has exacerbated an already dire food security crisis. Fish, once a vital source of protein and other essential nutrients for Gazans, is now nearly unavailable. And with Hamas holding food stocks hostage, the people are at wit’s end.

“In Gaza’s fishing areas now lie broken boats, torn nets, and ruined infrastructure, standing in stark contrast to the once-vibrant industry that supported thousands of fishers for generations,” said the FAO Deputy Director-General, Beth Bechdol. It is not clear if she was there personally.

“For Gazans, the sea was not just a source of food, but a source of livelihood and identity. FAO can assist to help rebuild Gaza’s fishing industry, but for this to happen peace must first be established and fishers must be allowed to operate their boats and cast their nets without fear of harm,” she added.   

Ciro Fiorillo, Head of the FAO Office for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, stated, “FAO is ready to restart projects, replenish damaged boats and equipment, and inject emergency funds as soon as these key fishing inputs for production are allowed to enter the Strip, a sustained ceasefire is in place, and access to the sea is restored.

“This will help Gazan fishers resume their activities, revitalize livelihoods, contribute to economic recovery, and restore dignity to the people of Gaza.”

Before the escalation of hostilities, FAO supported over 4,000 Gazan fishers, improving food security, safety, and sustainability. Key initiatives like the marine cage project and enhanced fish stock monitoring, helped to establish inland fish farms, enhanced fishers’ skills, shared best practices, and supplied essential cold chain resources, including solar panels, ensuring a more resilient food source for Gaza.

Despite all the billions in aid given to Gaza, most of it was used to build tunnels and bombs and the fishing industry on its own could not survive without outside help, which raises an eye. How we can help Gazans?

All images supplied by the UN. December 2024. Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip.

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“It was the best butter, you know,” said the March Hare. 

The current butter crisis in Israel evokes the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.  The same surreal logic reigns here.

Once there were two dairies producing butter in Israel, Tara and Tnuva. Tara, citing profit loss for reasons explained below, stopped producing butter. And the Tnuva  brand butter has been as scarce as hen’s teeth for over a year now. Shoppers drive from market to market in hopes of finding, and pouncing on, the familiar silver package with its logo of a little red cow shed. When a butter cache appears in a local store, people light signal fires to one another via the social media: “I found it here – hurry up and get some before it’s gone!”

Almost everyone is hoarding a cache of butter in their freezer. And the feeling is almost of buying on black market, with a lucky score something to brag about.

People are taking the butter drought in fairly good humor now, but the grumbles are gathering weight and starting to sound louder, as shown by this photo showing a package of increasingly rare Tnuva butter posed next to a silver necklace.

The public has been offered a variety of imported butters – from Holland, Belgium, Lithuania, France, and other countries. A strange product made of mixed butter and oil sits on the shelves, rightly viewed with disdain. These imported butters are far more expensive than the dear departed Israeli stuff. But where has the native butter gone?

Tnuva, Israel’s largest food company, began close to 80 years ago as a cooperative owned dairy farmers from kibbutzim and moshavim. By 2007, the British firm Apax owned 56.05% of Tnuva. The Israeli investment  company Mivtach Shamir held, and still holds, 20.67% of Tnuva, and a minority of 23.3% is owned by kibbutz partners who refused to sell their shares.  In 2014, Apax sold its shares to Bright Food, China’s second largest food conglomerate. 

Bright Food has been acquiring more foreign food companies in the last few years. In 2018, they bought the US meat processing giant Smithfield Foods. Previously they acquired the UK cereal company Weetabix. Meat, dairy, and breakfast cereal.  One gets the feeling that all this conforms to a 10-year plan.

The Chinese takeover of Tnuva wasn’t popular in Israel. Voices against the purchase were heard in the Knesset Economic Affairs Committee at the time. There was strong concern over the fact that a critically important food producer was going to be controlled by a foreign government.  The Committee Chairman, MK Avishay Braverman asked the government to  prevent the sale of Tnuva, to no avail.

Former Mossad director Efraim Halevy warned that the sale could jeopardize Israeli food security, and possibly go further.

“The fact that Israel’s largest food company is owned by the Chinese government will lead to a situation where the company implements policies that serve the interests of China [and not Israel],” he said in an interview with Ynet. “For China, Tnuva isn’t just a food company,” Halevi added. “China is doing everything it can to involve itself in Israeli research and development. The Chinese are very creative and flexible. If we do not wake up in time we will find that they will take over not only our food, but our academia. We must organize in order to defend Israeli assets, which are part of our national security conception.”

Dairy farmers protested in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, worried that the Bright Food takeover would jeopardize previous supply contracts with Apax. The public expressed disgust but had no say in the matter.

Israeli consumers turned to expensive imported butters. But there’s less of even imported butter now. Until recently, imported butter bore a heavy tax (from 126-140% for table butter and 144-160% for industrial butter), which importers were reluctant to pay because the government forbade selling it for more than the regulation price of NIS 3.94 per 100 grams.  Many importers simply declined to bring butter in.

Attempting to save the situation, the Agriculture and Economy ministries recently decided to open a tender for importing up to 5,000 tonnes of customs-free butter, with no market price restrictions attached. But this was done too late to avert the crisis. In spite of Israeli’s reluctant acceptance of high-priced imported butter, less and less of it appears on the shelves.

In point of fact, there are currently hundreds of containers of imported foods, and butter among them, sitting in Haifa and Ashdod ports. Due to the High Holidays that occurred in September and October, the containers have not been inspected by the Ministry of Health, and so have not been released.

For the consumer, all this wrangling ultimately means less butter, and when it’s available, it’s expensive. People are currently complaining that there’s no butter at all on market shelves. This at a time when demand has only gone up, due to nutritional trends encouraging consumers to eat less GMO-based oils and trans fats. 

The Economy and Industry ministries recommend getting rid of  tariffs on imported butter and opening the Israeli market to competition. But under Israel’s current interim government,  policy changes are unlikely to be made any time soon. In the meantime, the Agriculture and Economy ministries cite unequal distribution of import quotas and blame each other for it.  

The mystery is, given the proved demand for more butter, why not allow Israeli farmers to increase milk production, thus allowing Tnuva to obtain the milk fat needed to make it? And where does Bright Food fit into this puzzle, if indeed it does?

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One in eight people around the world are chronically hungry, and in the future things may get even worse. Human  population is expected to increase significantly, and climate change is making it harder than ever to grow healthy crops in more and more regions.

Netherlands-based Solynta is a leading seed breeding company which has developed an innovative technology for targeted breeding of one of the world’s fourth largest staple crops – potatoes. The mighty spud is relatively cheap, highly nutritious, and already eaten in most countries. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recommends potato cultivation for countries seeking to increase their food security, as they can be grown most anywhere.

Compared to other crops like rice, corn and wheat, potatoes produce far more food per hectare, and far more food per liter of water used, helping feed large numbers of people while also mitigating the effects of climate change. According to the FAO, up to 85 percent of the plant is edible human food, compared to around 50% in cereals.

Potatoes are highly nutritious and contain more of the 21 vitamins and trace elements than any other staple crops. They are rich in carbohydrates, making them a good source of energy, and boast the highest protein content (around 2.1 percent on a fresh weight basis) in the family of root and tuber crops. They are also rich in vitamin C and contain a fifth of the recommended daily value of potassium.

Currently, most potato farmers are forced to rely on poor-quality ‘seed tubers’ – specially-grown potato tubers which are used as starting material, but which are easily perishable and are infected with pests and diseases. The result is low yields.

Solynta’s “True Seed” technology has the potential to help solve all these problems, by delivering potatoes which can double yields over seed-tubers; are more resistant to drought; and require fewer harmful pesticides and fungicides. These hybrid seeds are completely disease-free and are also far easier to store and transport than tubers. On average, 25 grams of True Seeds produces the same crop as 2,500 kilos of seed tubers, resulting in significant reductions in transport costs and carbon emissions.

Agriculture consumes more than 2/3 of total available freshwater through irrigation. Depletion of water reserves could cause a 40% supply gap by 2030. An increase in the proportion of potato in the diet would alleviate pressure on water resources. Also, by breeding natural resistances into the crop there will be a significant reduction (>60%) of pesticide use and therefor limit the runoff of pesticides into the water system.

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According to a statement released by the Media Office, the new organization will working in partnership “with hotels and restaurants, food-manufacturing companies and supermarkets and introduce a process of preserving, storing and packaging the food, with the goal to optimize usage and achieve zero waste.” Sheikh Mohammed’s wife, Sheikha Hind bint Maktoum, will chair its board of trustees.

The action plan is straightforward:

• Dubai Municipality will give operational support – collecting, packaging, storing and distributing the food.

• Trained volunteers will support activities at all Food Bank locations. They will also collect surplus food from the appointed authorities, and distribute it to those in need, in and outside the UAE.

• The Food Bank will also recycle the remnants of inedible food for re-use as nonconsumable products, as example, for agricultural fertilizer and as feedstock for scientific research.

• Food Bank partners and participants will adhere to “an integrated mechanism for food preservation”, based on international food safety guidelines and best practices.

• The operation will start in Dubai and then expand to underdeveloped communities beyond the UAE.

“The Year of Giving provides a golden opportunity for UAE citizens and institutions to maximise their philanthropic potential by launching humanitarian initiatives. We chose ‘food’ as our first initiative as it is one of the most basic human needs,” Sheikh Mohammed explained. “Through the UAE Food Bank, we aim to instill the value of giving deep in the hearts of our people.”

“We are also inspired by the boundless generosity of UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan,” he added, “especially during the month of Ramadan, when he provides meals to millions of underprivileged people daily. The UAE Food Bank seeks to immortalize these values in future generations by engaging community-based volunteers and organisations so that the spirit of philanthropy spreads beyond the borders of the UAE as the Year of Giving unfolds.”

Dubai’s hospitality industry is robust, with a clear focus on delivering top-class eating experiences. According to calculations by TOPHOTELPROJECTS, which tracks worldwide first-class and luxury hotel construction projects, Dubai’s hotel rooms will reach more than 100,000 by 2020, when the emirate hosts the World Expo. Food waste on a grand scale is inevitable, now estimated to cost the emirate over USD $3.5 billion each year.

Last June, Ivano Ianelli, CEO of Dubai Carbon, reported that “an average person in Europe generates around 1.2kg of waste a day, which is less than half the per capita waste generation of 2.7kg per day in the UAE. This doubles to 5.4kg a day during Ramadan in the UAE. Clearly this is something that needs to be addressed.”

The UAE has previously tackled waste caused by public phobia about ‘sell-by” dates, and in 2012 initiated a program to encourage mall operators to segregate organic waste from general trash thereby minimizing the material slated for landfills and streamlining municipal waste management. But the emirate remains alongside Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait when it comes to unecessary food waste. The Food Bank holds potential to place the emirate as a regional and world leader in creative solutions to both food poverty and waste control.

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RELATED: flux leads smart monitor in hydroponics for everyone!

The surge in projected productivity rests on the Zulal Oasis hydroponics project in Al Shahaniyah, west of capital city Doha, sponsored by Hassad Food in partnership with Oasis Agrotechnology, a consortium led by Spain’s Primalor Group. The two-year pilot project successfully grew tomatoes without soil using recycled irrigation water in greenhouses specifically adapted to Qatar’s punishing heat, where summer daytime temperatures exceed 110 °F.

The greenhouses use Primaflor technology which features a dry air cooling system.  It doesn’t use soil or substrate materials, and gets moisture from recycled irrigation water. It is “the most advanced hydroponic system in the world,” Hassad Food said in a statement.

Nasser Mohamed al-Hajri, chairman and managing director of Hassad Food, “The Zulal Oasis technology is a long-term sustainable production model, with the capability of producing high-grade crops 12 months a year regardless of season.”

The dry cooling technology is an automated smart control system that controls interior greenhouse temperature, independent of outdoor weather, eliminating regional climate challenges such as high humidity, heat and a lack of groundwater.

The company plans to deploy this technology to grow cucumbers, eggplant, peppers and varieties of squash – all popular vegetables in Qatar cuisine. In addition to growing vegetables, the system can also be used for herb, fruit and flower production.  Other produce could be grown outdoors using the system, but the growing season would be limited to cooler months.

Qatar imports the majority of its food, making it vulnerable to supply disruption and pricing fluctuations. In 2013, it launched a National Food Security program to make the water-parched state more self-sufficient in fresh produce. Since 2009, home-grown food volume has increased (specifically dates, cucumbers and green peppers) partly due to an expansion in cultivated land. However, according to the latest agricultural report from the Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics, Qatar’s largest crop is not used for human consumption: farmers are cultivating livestock fodder to meet the dramatic rise in red meat and dairy production.

Hassad Foods is Qatar’s premier investor in the food and agribusiness sectors, focused on Qatar food security, and of course, turning a profit. Established in 2008, the company and its subsidiaries annually produce 9,000 tons of livestock fodder, 3 million cut flowers, 100 tons of chemical free vegetables, 190,000 tons of grains and 290,000 heads of sheep.

Hassad Food said the Zulal Oasis system is cost-effective for farmers, as production costs would be lower than importing the same quality of fresh produce. It also allows farmers to diversify their crops to meet local demand. Bloomberg reported that the company is in talks on sharing its technology with investors in Saudi Arabia and Oman, and the technology is now being licensed for local farmers to use. Bring it on.

Images from Hassad Foods

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A team of Syrian scientists at the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) braved the terrors of civil war to protect a critical piece of global heritage, meticulously transporting plant genetic material from a seed bank in Aleppo to the Svalbard Seed Vault in Norway. Their actions to protect the region’s ancient farming heritage – nearly 150,000 seed samples collected over the past four decades from dryland regions worldwide – earned them the Gregor Mendel Innovation Prize for outstanding contributions to plant breeding.

Syria’s civil war has decimated the nation, killing about 300,000 people and creating the largest humanitarian crisis in world history. The United Nations estimated that by the end of August 2014, 6.5 million people were displaced within Syria, and more than 3 million refugees had fled to other countries. The conflict presented the ICARDA gene bank with a uniquely specific challenge; protect the genetic wealth of regional food crops.

ICARDA is one of 11 such biorepositories in the world helping to preserve seeds that are used by plant breeders and scientists worldwide. They focus on crops grown in arid climates like Syria, preserving genes that, in turn, help promote agricultural development in other dry areas.

The Aleppo facility contained the world’s largest collection of barley, fava bean and lentil seeds, ancient varieties of durum and bread wheat, and wild crops collected throughout the Fertile Crescent. This region that includes Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq is the site of the earliest recorded crop domestication.

“We are entrusted with the genetic wealth from some 128 countries – a resource we cannot afford to lose as it ensures long-term public welfare,” Dr. Mahmoud Solh, director general of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), said in a statement. “Almost all our germaplasm collections are now saved outside Syria.” More than 80 percent of the globally unique collection of crop genetic resources stored at ICARDA’s Aleppo genebank is now safely duplicated at the Norwegian facility, the balance in gene banks around the world.

The ICARDA team drove seeds out of the country, using foreign connections to increase the likelihood that the seeds would be safely ferried across Syrian borders. Advised to leave the country, 50 members elected to stay behind to continue the germoplasm evacuation to the Norwegian bank.

Read more about the Svalbard Seed Vault – link here.

The Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, managed jointly by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen) and the Government of Norway, acts as an insurance policy against catastrophic crop destruction from natural or man-made events. It houses over 20 million seed types from around the world. The power of genebanks lie in their inter-connectivity as a worldwide network of genetic resources. Banks around the world are now working to regenerate the Syrian samples to test their ongoing viability.

The Middle East is where humanity first learned agriculture, revolutionizing life by shifting from a migratory hunter/gatherer existence to a settled mode of farming that eventually led to modern civilization.  While genebank inventories are rooted in the past,  their mandate is fully futuristic. They preserve crop biodiversity and ensure future food supply, life-critical functions in an unstable world and particularly important in the face of climate change.

Crisis is never one-dimensional. It’s more like an onion.  Peel back the skin to discover distinct layers of need, often mutually exclusive despite having a common cause.  Each has merit, each warrants our attention, and each competes for limited human and cash resources. Stories like this – broadcasting the enormous positive impact resulting from individual action – are bright points in regional darkness. Keep calm and carry on.

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It’s already happening, and it works like this. Start-ups in the nascent “nutrient-recycling” industry collect abattoir waste and process it into foodstock for flies. The flies breed inside special cages where newly hatched larvae are easily collected, then dried and compressed into flakes or powder used as a feed ingredient for larger meat-producing livestock.

Could this be a powerful contributor to a more sustainable food industry?

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, World Wide Fund for Nature, and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa all think it’s the most promising way forward to feed the planet. Just as a vegetarian meal uses less natural resources than a meat-based meal, feeding animals bug-based chow uses fewer resources than farming fish or vegetables for the same purpose.

Today nearly 30% of all wild-caught fish goes to feeding farmed fish, poultry, or pigs. About 95% of world soybean production – which depends on arable land and water – goes into animal feed.  PROteINSECT, an EU-funded project investigating how flies can help meet future demands for protein, conducted breeding trials and found that one hectare of land could produce at least 150 tons of insect protein per year. By comparison, soy planted over the same area yields just under a ton of protein per year.  Feeding trials also suggest that a bug-based diet will produce bigger, stronger livestock.

Insect-based feed  prices fall between the soy meal and more expensive fish meal.  And fly “ranching” has the smallest environmental footprint of the three.

Garbage in, protein out.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization released a report (link here) promoting insects as a basic ingredient in animal feed and human diet. It asserts that insects are ideal as they can be sustainably reared on vegetable and domestic waste as well as slaughterhouse byproducts.

Look at AgriProtein. Co-founded in 2010 by brothers Jason and David Drew, the South African company is shaking up the supply chain, devising new ways to recycle meat industry waste (blood, guts, manure) into insect feed for animals who now consume meal made of fish and soybeans.

Jason Drew told the Guardian, “A third of all the fish we take out of our seas is ground up into fishmeal. The catches are unsustainable and the falling supply and increasing demand are leading to prices hitting new highs.”  He added that the bug-based alternative, “means tonnes of fish we don’t need to take from the sea, and less waste to landfill.” Their first large-scale factory will be working this year, farming about 8.5 billion flies who will produce seven tonnes of their maggot-based feed, MagMeal, daily.

Vancouver’s Enterra Feed makes insect-based feed and fertilizer. Next month they will open a largely automated production facility where larvae are grown in sensor-rigged trays that track the time and content of automatic feedings, and ambient temperatures within the trays. That data allows technicians to decide best harvest times when insect protein and fat content is at its peak.  The facility will accept 100 tons of pre-consumer food waste daily to feed its population of black soldier flies.

A Parisian start-up, Ynsect, claims to be building the world’s first fully automated large-scale insect production facility, capable of producing 10,000 tons of dried protein meal, liquid fat, and chitin-derived products from insects each year. Construction will begin next year.

Health experts press for more data. 

Regulatory processes about insects differ widely across countries. Following a national outbreak of mad cow disease, the EU introduced legislation in 2001 that treats insects like livestock once they have been dried and converted into a flake or powder form: in this case, banning them – along with other processed animal proteins – from feed for animals reared for human consumption. There is also a law against farmed animals being raised on waste such as manure.

AgriProtein’s maggot feed has been approved in South Africa for fish and chickens, but not mammals. Dutch regulations restrict Amsterdam-based Protix Biosystems to producing its insect-based feeds for research purposes only. “The concept of the insect as a protein source is something nature already evolved to perfection,” says cofounder Kees Aarts. “We just need scalable technologies.”

Novelty insect-based foods like “Chirps” (tortilla chips made from ground crickets) and Chapul baked goods (made from cricket flour) are emerging online and on shop shelves, but the idea of eating insects is still a stretch for most.

Aarts suggests that the looming crises in food and water will prompt rapid changes in global legislation. “As a feed ingredient it’s common sense … nature’s principles apply,” he says.

Image of fly larvae from Shutterstock

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WASHINGTON — Inhabitants of the oil-exporting sheikhdoms and emirates of the Persian Gulf wolf down an average 3,700 calories a day —leading to the highest rates of obesity on Earth — even as at least 805 million people, one-ninth of the world’s population, go hungry.

Such huge disparities will ultimately lead to widespread unrest, warns Deborah Wheeler, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy who specializes in Middle East politics.

Wheeler (pictured below while on research in Kuwait) was one of a dozen experts meeting Oct. 16 at Virginia’s George Mason University, just outside Washington, for a summit on global food security and health.

“The United Nations says we will add two billion people by 2050 and an additional one billion by 2100, for a total world population of around 10 billion,” said GMU public policy professor Kenneth A. Reinert, a frequent consultant for the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the U.S. Department of Commerce. “Approximately one billion of these additional individuals will reside in Africa, and another one billion in Asia. Both Africa and South Asia are currently basic goods-deprived environments.

Even worse, he said, “the majority of countries whose population growth is expected to be fastest in the future are precisely those showing inadequate food consumption and high levels of undernourishment.”

At the other extreme are a handful of small Arab states in the Persian Gulf that owe their mind-blowing wealth entirely to oil and gas. Qatar’s annual per-capita income exceeds $100,000, making that country’s 2.1 million inhabitants among the world’s wealthiest. Excluding migrant workers who form the vast majority of Qatar’s population, per-capita GDP jumps to nearly $690,000.

Oil rich but very food insecure

Yet Deborah Wheeler, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, sees dark clouds on the horizon.

“These countries depend more than 90 percent on the global food market to eat and drink,” she said. “Kuwait imports 98 percent of what it eats and drinks. It makes sense for them to import. But relying on that global market is becoming increasingly problematic.”

Wheeler, whose presentation at GMU was titled “Food Security and Gluttony in a Water Scarce Region: Lessons in Sustainability from the Arabian Gulf,” showed her audience a photo of the glitzy new Dean & DeLuca gourmet food emporium in Kuwait City. At 21,500 square feet, it’s the largest Dean & DeLuca franchise in the Middle East.

Another image was of the new Cheesecake Factory outlet at a Kuwait City mall.

“We’ve sent all our worst habits to the Gulf, and they are very happy to have them,” she said. “The Gulf countries are a perfect lab for studying non-communicable diseases. Diabetes is growing faster here than anywhere else on the planet, yet they’re in a water-scarce region — and it’s oil wealth that allows them to mask this problem.”

Wheeler, a political scientist, has done research in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Morocco, Israel and the United Arab Emirates. She specializes in information technology diffusion and its impact on the Arab world, as well as gender issues and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. She said that in Kuwait, 70 percent of the adult population, and 48 percent of all adolescents, are either overweight or obese.

Food insecurity could lead to radicalization

“As we know, as GDP goes up, consumption is transformed. These are rich countries and they eat like rich countries. The problem is, they don’t produce anything they eat,” she warned. “In spite of having all that oil wealth, which allows them to live way beyond their ecological footprints, we’re starting to see cracks. How did the Tunisian revolution start? A vegetable seller set himself on fire. That led to a transition.”

Wheeler added: “These countries are so fragile. As soon as they collapse, we’re going to see massive Islamization.”

RELATED: Gulf States land grab for food production in Africa

In fact, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates rank in the bottom 10 percent of the world’s sustainable nations. All of these countries have seen population growth exceeding three times the global average, yet during the same time there’s been a rapid decline in the amount of available fresh water.

These countries are also among the biggest food wasters in the world, producing 150 million tons of municipal garbage a year. In addition, they release more carbon into the atmosphere on a per-capita basis than anyone else. Yet they don’t produce anything, which is why the Gulf Cooperation Council’s food import bill has jumped by 105 percent since 2010; experts estimate that the six GCC nations will spend a combined $53 billion a year on food by 2020.

“These people lead highly consumptive lifestyles that are ultimately dangerous to public health,” Wheeler said.

It’s no wonder diabetes is through the roof in Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE; citizens of the GCC nations consume an average 3,700 calories a day. They also have the world’s highest per-capita water consumption, even though their countries are among the driest on the planet.

“People are aware of the fact the cost of living is increasing rapidly. And what are their governments doing? They’re cutting subsidies. This leads to public protests in places where we don’t expect it,” she said, adding this is why Washington needs to be concerned. “Last summer while I was in Kuwait, there were public demonstrations in support of Islamic State. They’re upset with their government, and any movement that looks like it might sweep that existing government out of the way will get their support.”

Image of  Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Almaktoum from 965malls; top image of kabsa mandi from Saudi Arabia from UCAELI

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Most Gulf countries import up to 90 percent of their food, which neither bodes well for food security no climate change – since the food that is brought in from Europe and elsewhere has a lot of what are called “food miles.” True to their name, Forward Thinking Architecture proposes a solar-powered hydroponic food belt as a solution.

Acknowledging that they are not designing anything new – because there are already several projects throughout the Arabian peninsula that utilize the sun and hydroponics to deliver food in the desert. One project that comes to mind is the Sahara Forest Project which has received a great deal of international press.

The OAXIS system aims to fuse existing technology in a modular, linear arrangement. The growing medium will consist of prefabricated and recycled steel structures equipped with super efficient irrigation technology that uses roughly 80 percent less water than most farms require. Rooftop solar panels provide energy not only for the architecture itself, but also to power artificial LED lighting that will help promote greater crop growth.

Related: Qatar’s Sahara Forest Project Produces Cucumbers with Saltwater

In order to transport these crops directly to cities throughout the peninsula, the design team proposes an underground transportation network that would also be powered by solar energy. In this way, the system is completely self-sufficient, and hardly contributes at all to harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

“…our objective is not to compete with nature and its amazing processes or with an existing oasis such as Al-Hasa, the design team says in their brief. “What we propose is a safe and controlled hydroponic facility based on a modular linear pattern, a city new ‘green axis.’

“It will produce solar energy to become self-sufficient and capable of running an underground transportation system that deliver the crops directly to the cities, shortening long distance food transportation (imports) and therefore reducing CO2 emissions.”

We particularly love the use of recycled steel, which has a very high embodied energy footprint, as well as the ubiquitous use of renewable energy. And the crops will grow year-round and could include strawberries, tomatoes, rocket, potatoes, thyme, lettuce, bell peppers, basil and more.

It’s an impressive design, and it could work!

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Recovery in the agriculture sector, once hostilities cease, will require significant external assistance over the long term. And this is where we see opportunities for alternative agriculture systems for smallholder farmers and families. Aquaponics and hydroponics can be done on rooftops, and it is especially meaningful in areas where water is severely limited.

The FAO estimates that the recent fighting has resulted in substantial direct damage to Gaza’s 17,000 hectares of croplands as well as much of its agricultural infrastructure, including greenhouses, irrigation systems, animal farms, fodder stocks and fishing boats.

According to the latest update Gaza has lost half of its population of poultry birds (broilers and layers) either due to direct hits on their shelters or lack of water, feed or care resulting from access restrictions.

Around 64,000 head of small ruminants are in need of animal feed and water in order to avoid further animal deaths and the additional erosion of herders’ productive assets.

Meanwhile losses by Gaza’s fishing sector so far are estimated at 234.6 tonnes over the period 9 July – 10 August –equivalent to 9.3 percent of local fishers’ yearly catch.

“Up to now, ongoing military operations have prevented detailed assessments of damages to agriculture from being completed,” said Ciro Fiorillo, head of FAO’s office in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Gaza Strip imports most of what it eats — however locally produced food represents an important source of nutritious and affordable food, and some 28,600 people in Gaza rely on farming (19,000 people), livestock raising (6,000) and fishing (3,600) for their livelihoods.

“Under the most recent ceasefire many farmers and herders are now able to access their lands, however resumption of food production faces serious obstacles given the damages sustained and shortages of water, electricity, inputs and financial resources, as well as ongoing uncertainty regarding the possible resumption of military activities”, said Fiorillo.

Volatile food prices

While they have never lacked variety, in part from active smuggling tunnels to Egypt, food prices in Gaza have fluctuated considerably compared with before hostilities began, registering significant increases for certain products such as eggs and many vegetables.

Upward spikes have ranged from a 40 percent increase in the price of eggs to a 42 percent increase for potatoes to a 179 percent spike in the price of tomatoes. Tomatoes, even fish can be grown with ease on rooftops and small plots of land using aquaponics and hydroponics.

With local food production halted and food imports curtailed, virtually the entire population of Gaza (about 1.8 million people) is currently reliant on food aid. But it doesn’t have to be so. Companies like flux are developing tools to make it super easy for people to grow their own food and plants on water, without soil.

Emergency fodder for animals

As soon as a permanent ceasefire is established FAO, with support from Canada, will distribute fodder to feed 55 000 small ruminants throughout Gaza for 45 days. The Organization is also positioned to distribute 4 000, 1-cubic metre water tanks to help herders water their animals.

“We have a programme that supports the resilience of agriculture-based livelihoods of Gaza fishermen, herders and farmers,” said Abdessalam Ould Ahmed, FAO Regional Representative for the Near East and North Africa. “We need to get this back on track as soon as hostilities cease, to promote not just survival of Gaza’s people but their self-reliant development.”

Again we emphasize the need for Gazans to take the future into their own hands and start rooftop and backyard farming. This approach can ease the current crisis and help people be self-reliant no matter the political circumstance.

Above image via flux

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