Food, Land, Water : Africa and emerging Gulf sub-imperialisms

Conflict has torn Sudan apart. Recent news reports document bloodstains visible from space. In typical fashion, foreign interests are at the heart of Sudan’s bloody war : the main backer for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is the United Arab Emirates (UAE). But the story is bigger than just funding a violent paramilitary group in Sudan. The UAE and most of the other oil-rich Arab Gulf states are involved in a ‘new scramble for Africa’, inserting themselves in the continent’s politics, buying up land, purchasing port concessions, and entrenching themselves as major trade partners with African countries.

The scale of Gulf investment in Africa has ballooned over the past two decades. The UAE alone now rivals – and in some measures surpasses – China as Africa’s largest source of foreign direct investment (FDI). These flows are not confined to one sector. Emirati capital spans ports, logistics, mining, energy, finance, as well as agriculture. Gulf influence goes beyond the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, reaching towards the Horn of Africa and the Sahel. Sudan and Ethiopia, where vast tracts of fertile land, water access, and strategic trade corridors converge, are key nodes in the Gulf strategy.

Land, food, and trade : why agro-investment matters

In Sudan and Ethiopia, Gulf capital has targeted large-scale agricultural estates, livestock production, and agro-processing, often through joint ventures with local elites or state authorities. The framing of purchased land as under or un-utilised gives the deals legitimacy, regardless of local land use. In Sudan, millions of hectares have been leased or concessioned for commercial agriculture and livestock production, frequently at the expense of smallholders and pastoralists. Water resources are redirected from subsistence farming to export-oriented agribusiness, reshaping agrarian relations and accelerating proletarianisation. Similar dynamics have unfolded in Ethiopia, where Saudi Arabia comes on top as the major land investor. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been working hard to attract Gulf capital to Ethiopia since falling out of favour with the West following the war in Tigray. This capital is essential in financing Abiy’s development projects, which have involved massive displacement of populations. In Ethiopia, processes of dispossession in rural areas are mirrored in urban areas. Capitalist development has involved the precarisation of already vulnerable populations, with the full approbation of the state.

Trade relations between Sudan and Ethiopia and the Gulf exemplify their extractive relationship. Sudan (and Somalia) supplies the overwhelming majority of livestock consumed in the Gulf. Ethiopia’s economy remains overwhelmingly dependent on agricultural exports. Agriculture forms the material base of rural livelihoods and national economies alike, yet precisely because food is “ordinary”, it attracts less scrutiny than the political economy of oil or rare minerals. Food is not simply another commodity : it is the substance of human life. Control over land and food production is a form of structural power, determining who eats, who labours, and who starves.

The Food Security Excuse

UAE and Saudi Arabia use food security discourse to justify overseas land acquisitions. With arid climates, desertification, scarce water, and growing populations, they present foreign farmland as a rational hedge against volatile global markets. National food security strategies, specialised ministries, and public–private partnerships reinforce this narrative.

This justification does not withstand scrutiny. The UAE is among the most food-secure countries in the world, far out-ranking Sudan and Ethiopia, both of which face chronic food insecurity, according to the Food Security Index. Food waste in the UAE remains staggering, reaching 60% during Ramadan in Dubai. The problem is not shortage.

What Gulf investments are consolidating is control over agro-food commodity chains : from land and water, through production and processing, to ports, shipping, and re-export. State-linked conglomerates such as DP World, AD Ports, Al-Dahra, and Jenaan operate across this entire chain, integrating agriculture with logistics infrastructure along the Red Sea and Africa’s coastline.

Control over ports, transport corridors, and shipping lanes enables Gulf capital to extract value efficiently while insulating itself from political risk. This is why food investments sit alongside port concessions and, increasingly, military involvement. The war in Sudan exposes this logic starkly. The UAE’s alleged support for the Rapid Support Forces cannot be separated from its material interests in land, gold, and access to the Red Sea. “Food security” thus functions less as a genuine concern than as an ideological cover for accumulation.

Primitive accumulation and the Horn as an extraction frontier

Across Sudan and Ethiopia, land is being transformed from a communal means of subsistence into a financial asset. Water is enclosed ; labour is disciplined ; and social relations are restructured in service of capital. This is in continuity with the history of imperialist plunder and exploitation in the continent. Africa has long been subjected to waves of dispossession – colonial, neocolonial, and now financialised.

Positioned between core imperial powers and peripheral economies, the Gulf states act as sub-imperial brokers of accumulation. As Patrick Bond notes in BRICS : An Anti-Capitalist Critique (2018), emerging powers do as much to reinforce the hierarchies of capitalism and imperialism as they do to challenge them. The Gulf states in particular are clearly not anti-imperialist alternatives but integral components of contemporary capitalism, operating as sub-imperial powers that stabilise, rather than subvert, the global order.

Gulf capital does not challenge global capitalism ; it deepens it. Considering the four relations of sub-imperialism identified by Bond – to imperialism, to capitalist crisis, to regional hegemony and to super-exploitation. By exporting surplus capital into African land, food systems, and infrastructure, Gulf states help resolve crises of overaccumulation at home while extending capitalist relations abroad. They are dependent on American dollar hegemony and defend Western interests in the broader Middle East, while also crafting imperialist strategies of their own. Super-profits have raised the living standards of a layer of the Gulf population, off of the backs of migrant workers a super-exploited class, used to facilitate accumulation.

Some critics bring up the fact that investments in Africa are unpredictable and risky. They often face delays, and at times don’t offer the expected return. This is used to push back against the framing of the Gulf states as predatory powers. But imperialism has never been reducible to short-term returns. It is about ‘the struggle for economic territory’, as explained by Lenin ; it is not a policy, but a stage of capitalism. Gulf involvement, though articulated through South-South rhetoric and development discourse, has the hallmarks of imperialist plunder.

Placing the Gulf states within ‘sub-imperialism’ avoids the exceptionalizing discourses around them. Orientalist and laudatory depictions of the Gulf states as either authoritarian and ‘barbaric’, or extremely wealthy and modern both obscure the reality at play. They are at the heart of the functioning of global capitalism. Gulf political economy is the expression of rapidly expanding, ambitious, capitalism.

Our understanding of dynamics on the African continent will condition our solidarity. Who is the real enemy ? Where and against whom should we focus our efforts ? As war rages on in Sudan, it is clear that a consistent anti-imperialist politics involves opposing the UAE as well as its backers in the West. But the struggle will continue after the war too, long after media coverage has ceased, for access to land, to water, to logistics infrastructure and to precious resources. Rather than offering a radically different, Global South led development paradigm, Gulf involvement in Africa reproduces the worst aspects of parasitic and decaying capitalism.

Sarah Cotte is a French-Ethiopian researcher. She is currently completing an MSc in Development Studies at the London School of Economics. Her research interests include African political economy, agrarian political economy, Marxist economics and imperialism. She is passionate about doing research which speaks directly to real-world struggles, bridging the gap between academia and political organising.