The Western Region accounts for 60 per cent of Abu Dhabi’s landmass, yet lags behind the far smaller region of Al-Ain when it comes to agriculture. That is now changing.

Visitors to Abu Dhabi could be forgiven for not thinking of the emirate as a hotbed for agricultural activity. However, if Abu Dhabi Farmers’ Services Centre (ADFSC), the body charged with overseeing agricultural development in the emirate, has anything to do with it, more than two-thirds of the country’s fruit and vegetables will soon be produced domestically.

Key to this plan is the development of the Western Region into an agricultural hub. Although Al-Ain has traditionally been the site of the largest number of farms in the country in the past, the Western Region has become the fastest growing area of farming activity in recent years.

Farms increase

There is certainly plenty of space. Spanning 60,000 square kilometres, Al-Gharbia accounts for 60 per cent of Abu Dhabi’s landmass. Between 2005 and 2011, the total number of farms in the region increased from 7,382 to 8,559 (a 15.9 per cent rise), while the total area of land cultivated jumped by 11 per cent, from 189,414 sq km to 210,458 sq km, according to the Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority. During the same period, Al-Ain added just 355 farms, increasing total farmland in the area by 8,078 sq km, respective increases of 3 per cent and 1.8 per cent.

Further regional growth will be key to ADFSC’s plans to produce 40 per cent of domestic fruit and vegetable supply by 2015, reducing Abu Dhabi’s dependence on imported goods. The Western Region will be especially important, given that it currently produces more than a third of the country’s fruit, vegetables and crops.

The region is also an important source of one of the emirate’s delicacies: dates. According to Al-Foah Company, the UAE’s largest producer and distributor of dates, Al-Gharbia accounts for 32 per cent of dates produced in Abu Dhabi, in an industry worth $140m a year to the emirate. Liwa, one of the Arabian peninsula’s biggest oases, the region’s traditional mainstay of agricultural production and a growing tourism destination, even holds an annual date festival.

Yet there are several challenges to overcome for the region to become an agricultural success story. Whereas farms in Al-Ain tend to be quite large, the majority of agricultural producers in the Western Region are smallholders, as befits the area’s scattered collection of small communities (despite its size, the region accounts for less than 10 per cent of Abu Dhabi’s population), who struggle to produce goods at competitive prices.

The promotion of small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) is an integral part of Abu Dhabi’s current economic development strategy, however. In the two most populous areas of the region, Liwa and Madinat Zayed, 73 per cent and 30 per cent of the workforce respectively depend on farming, and the government is committed to improving agricultural livelihoods.

In 2012, Saudi Arabia banned the export of potatoes from the kingdom, and executives at ADFSC believe potato production could prove lucrative in the future. The centre has funded several pilot projects in the Western Region to test the viability of producing potatoes in the emirate.

The ADFSC has been working on a series of pilot projects to improve productivity among smallholding farmers, while the Khalifa Fund, which provides assistance to SMEs, has also been working with small farmers, particularly date producers. In 2008, the fund helped to fund a new factory being built by Liwa Dates, a company set up in 2006 by local businessman Mohammed Suhail al-Mazrouei to process and package locally produced dates. The facility was commissioned in 2011.

Water worries

Another challenge to the development of the agricultural sector in the region is water, a commodity that Abu Dhabi does not have in abundance. About half the country’s annual water usage – 73 billion gallons – is used for agriculture.

Since 2006, ADFSC has been working with farmers on schemes to improve the efficiency of water use and it reckons it can cut the amount of water used annually on agricultural projects by up to 40 per cent over the next four years. In 2012 alone, ADFSC provided 680 farms in the Western Region with new irrigation systems to improve efficiency.

Al-Gharbia’s potential is not limited to fruit and vegetables, though. ADFSC, along with the Western Region Development Council, sees livestock and fisheries as growth areas over the next five years. The region currently lags behind Al-Ain in livestock, with numbers totalling 461,159 in 2011, compared with the 1.5 million sheep, camels, and cattle bred in Al-Ain in the same year. But, as with agricultural production, livestock volumes have been on the rise in recent years, with the area reporting a total of 391,766 sheep and goats in 2011, a 55 per cent increase from figures for 2005. Overall, livestock bred in Al-Gharbia increased by 34 per cent between 2005 and 2011. Al-Ain recorded a much slower growth of 5.5 per cent over the same period.

There is no regional data for fisheries output in Abu Dhabi, but Al-Gharbia, with its lengthy coastline, is generally considered to be a key site for fisheries in the emirate, and has attracted considerable interest over the past few years.

In November 2012, Abu Dhabi-based Asmak International Fish Holdings announced it was investing AED220m ($60m) in two fisheries projects there. The first scheme, a 500 sq km fish farm capable of producing 4,000 tonnes of fish a year, is due for completion by the end of 2014. The second, an offshore fish farm of 250 sq km along with a processing plant capable of handling up to 1,000 tonnes a year of fish, should be completed over a similar period.

Rail support

Past studies of regional agriculture have highlighted the lack of access to markets, and the sector could be given a boost by the addition of a rail service to the region, reducing the lengthy journey from Al-Gharbia’s population centres to the more populous regions of Abu Dhabi and Al-Ain.

The first line of what is planned to be a regional network is being built by Italy’s Saipem and Tecnimont, along with India’s Dodsal Engineering & Construction, and will link Shah and Habshan in the southwest of Al-Gharbia with Ruwais on the coast, passing through Liwa.

Meanwhile, Al-Gharbia’s farmers are yet to catch on to a lucrative trend in agriculture that has already proved successful in the Abu Dhabi region of the emirate: organic farming. With greater access to the market, better water management and the weight of the government of Abu Dhabi behind plans to develop regional agriculture, the future looks bright for the region’s farmers.