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Akash Bhojwani, founder and managing director of Arclight Capital, argued that the Gulf has traditionally addressed its food imports through logistics and overseas farmland but is now positioned to treat the challenge as a finance opportunity. Bhojwani stated that food security ultimately depends on the health of supplying farms, most of which lack insurance or structured financing. According to Bhojwani, roughly 75 percent of agricultural risk worldwide remains uninsured while in Asia barely one in five smallholders carries crop cover. Premium collection from seasonal earners combined with slow claims processes has limited uptake for years.
Bhojwani highlighted recent advances in digital infrastructure as the key enabler for change in agricultural finance. India’s Unified Payments Interface now handles 81 percent of retail digital payments across nearly 700 banks serving more than 2.6 billion accounts under a consent-based data sharing framework. This setup allows lending against actual crop cycles and insuring real fields with satellite-triggered claims settled in hours rather than months after events such as failed monsoons. Bhojwani described these rails as transforming what had been an unprofitable sector for a century.
The investor identified the UAE-India corridor carrying more than 85 billion dollars in bilateral trade as the natural channel for deploying such capital. Arclight Capital was established to operate across that corridor by combining strategic advisory, investment guidance and long-term holdings with emphasis on rural payment and insurance systems. Bhojwani noted that Dubai serves as the point where Gulf capital seeks yield and Indian founders seek global markets, positioning agri-fintech as strategic infrastructure rather than a niche impact theme. Sovereign investors in the region have begun treating the sector in that light.
An Omnivore whitepaper on agrifood innovation for the India-GCC corridor reported that GCC countries import about 85 percent of their food despite ranking in the top 50 of the 2022 Global Food Security Index. Saudi Arabia’s Prince Saud bin Abdulaziz bin Abdullah Al Saud partnered in 2025 to launch two funds totaling 5 billion dollars targeting agricultural investments, cold-chain infrastructure and agritech across the GCC with plans to reach 10 billion dollars by 2035. The UAE maintains its National Food Security Strategy 2051 that targets a top-10 global ranking and a 50 percent rise in domestic production through initiatives including the Food Tech Valley.
A review by the Environmental Defense Fund found that global agricultural insurance markets remain deeply uneven with North America, Europe, China and India accounting for the vast majority of premiums while coverage stays limited across many low- and middle-income countries. Bhojwani cautioned that agricultural cycles demand underwriting in years rather than quarters and that much groundwork involves converting informal markets into machine-readable data. He added that the capital winning in emerging markets will be the patient capital that arrives early and remains committed through those timelines.
USDA Foreign Agricultural Service data placed the UAE’s agricultural imports above 27 billion dollars in 2025 with forecasts for 2026 reflecting adjustments due to inventory normalization and regional trade dynamics. Bhojwani concluded that de-risking the farmer constitutes the cheapest food security programme the Gulf could pursue given its dependence on distant supply fields. FAO-linked assessments of Asia-Pacific agricultural insurance have similarly pointed to persistent gaps for smallholders despite policy support and subsidy programmes in countries such as India and China.
