{
  "id": 2749792,
  "title": "Food security is the Gulf’s next great investment story",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/23/food-security-is-the-gulfs-next-great-investment-story",
  "topic": "business",
  "section": "Business",
  "published": "2026-08-23T07:21:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Gulf Times Business",
    "slug": "gulf-times-business",
    "url": "https://www.gulf-times.com/article/731642/business/food-security-is-the-gulfs-next-great-investment-story"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Food security is emerging as a pivotal investment opportunity in the Gulf region, according to Akash Bhojwani, Founder and Managing Director of Arclight Capital. Traditionally, the Gulf has imported most of its food, treating supply logistics as a matter of infrastructure. However, Bhojwani believes that food security is increasingly a financial matter, given the lack of insurance and financing for farmers. Roughly 75% of global agricultural risk remains uninsured, with only one in five smallholders carrying crop cover in Asia. Premiums are collected annually, and small policies cost more to manage than they return. The advent of digital rails, particularly in India—a key food trading partner for the Gulf—has changed the landscape. India's Unified Payments Interface handles 81% of retail digital payments, and its consent-based data sharing framework has enabled 2.6 billion accounts. By digitizing farmers' harvests and sales, Bhojwani argues, capital can be lent against real crop cycles and insurance can be provided for real fields, with claims settled in hours rather than months. The UAE-India corridor, which facilitates over $85 billion in bilateral trade, could serve as the financial artery for this transformation. Arclight Capital, seated at the intersection of strategic advisory, investment advisory, and long-term holdings, is poised to capitalize on this opportunity. Bhojwani emphasizes that the region's patience in capitalizing on emerging markets is crucial, as agricultural cycles move slowly and groundwork involves making informal markets machine-readable. He notes that while agricultural cycles are long, the capital that arrives early and remains will reap the rewards. For the Gulf, de-risking farmers is not merely an investment strategy but a policy imperative for ensuring food security.",
  "summary": "The Gulf imports most of what it eats. For decades that was treated as a logistics question, solved with long-term supply contracts and overseas farmland. Akash Bhojwani believes it is about to become...",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}