Thirty years ago, Al Dahra was built to solve a straightforward problem: feed the UAE. Today, it operates across 15 countries, manages more than 100,000 hectares of irrigated farmland, and moves commodities through 27 ports on four continents. On the surface, this is a story of expansion and scale. But what actually shifted is more fundamental, and more instructive for an industry navigating unprecedented pressure.
The global food system is facing structural strain, not cyclical headwinds. Geopolitical fragmentation, energy volatility, and climate unpredictability have become the operating baseline rather than temporary disruptions. In this environment, the companies that survive are not those that simply produce more efficiently. They are the ones that can perform reliably when conditions are difficult, that have built redundancy into their systems before crisis strikes, and that see technology not as a cost center but as competitive infrastructure.
When global shipping networks came under pressure in recent years, Al Dahra’s operations barely faltered because of deliberate preparation. The company had secured input supply early, diversified its logistics routes across continents, and invested in capabilities that allowed its teams to respond quickly to real-time change. That consistency under pressure reveals something important about how the company is actually built.
In this conversation, held alongside the release of Al Dahra’s 2025 Sustainability Report, Arnoud van den Berg, group CEO of Al Dahra, discusses the company’s transformation from a regional agricultural operator into a globally connected platform, the strategic imperatives that now define the industry, and why investors should be paying less attention to headlines about sustainability and more attention to the operational architecture that makes it real.
Al Dahra has grown from a single farm in Al Ain into a global agribusiness operating across roughly 20 countries. Looking at the company today, how would you describe Al Dahra’s strategic positioning, and what has shifted in how you see its role within the wider sector?
Al Dahra began with a clear and practical mandate: to grow food for the UAE. Over three decades, that mandate has evolved into something considerably broader. Today, we see our role as building a globally connected platform, one that farms at scale, operates with discipline, and distributes reliably across more than 40 markets.
We are building the world’s largest digitally enabled, irrigated farming platform, with a current footprint of more than 100,000 hectares and ambitions to grow significantly beyond that. Scale alone is not the objective. The objective is an operation that is durable, diversified, and capable of sustaining performance across the full range of conditions an increasingly unpredictable world presents. That is the shift: from a business defined by what it grows to one defined by how reliably it performs.
The global operating environment for agribusiness has changed materially in recent years, with fragmentation across geopolitics, trade, and energy, alongside increasing climate variability. From where you sit, what does that environment now ask of a company like Al Dahra over the next few years?
The operating environment has changed in a way I would describe as structural rather than cyclical. Fragmentation across geopolitics, trade, and energy markets is no longer temporary; it has become the baseline against which we plan, invest, and make decisions. Climate variability compounds that reality in ways no longer predictable against historical norms.
What this asks of Al Dahra is a fundamental reordering of priorities. The dominant question in agribusiness has historically been about efficiency: how do we produce more using fewer resources? That question has not disappeared, but it now sits alongside a more pressing one: how do we ensure the system holds when conditions are difficult? Reliability, optionality, and continuity have moved to the centre of value creation – direct drivers of the trust our customers and partners place in us.
The companies that will perform well are those that treat preparedness as strategic infrastructure rather than a contingency. That is the lens we apply at Al Dahra.
When global shipping patterns came under pressure recently, Al Dahra was widely recognised for the consistency of its operations. From a leadership perspective, what made the difference, and what does that say about how the company is built?
Consistency under pressure is not something that can be improvised. It is built in advance, through decisions on diversification, early contracting, logistics redundancy, and cross-functional coordination made long before any specific challenge arises.
In concrete terms: our teams had secured between 70 and 100 percent of seasonal input requirements early across key regions. Nearly 300 global shipments continued moving across 27 ports on four continents, with 10 percent of routes adjusted as conditions required. The Fujairah Strategic Grain Terminal, which has operated without interruption since 2015, continued to do exactly that.
But what I would also point to is the human dimension. Functions aligned daily across multiple time zones. The data tells one part of the story; the commitment of our people tells the other. Together, that discipline and human leadership created a network that simply did not stop.
Al Dahra has been investing significantly in precision agriculture, AI, and digital farm management. Where is the return on that investment most visible today, and how does it shape decision-making at a strategic level?
The return on investment in precision agriculture is most visible in three areas: yield optimisation, input efficiency, and decision speed. On yield, utilisation of IoT sensors, remote sensing, auto-guidance, and emerging AI technologies allows us to optimise every aspect of crop production based on soil moisture, satellite data, and climate projections. The impact of these technologies can shift yield by as much as 10 percent. That is 10 percent more output with no increase in land, water, or inputs.
On input efficiency, variable-rate seeding, nutrient application, and recently, even spraying with the assistance of computer vision-based AI models means giving each part of each field precisely what it needs, reducing water consumption, lowering fertiliser use, and supporting our sustainability commitments. We have rolled out a digital management platform across more than 89,000 hectares in Romania, Serbia, Egypt, and Morocco, bringing real-time monitoring and faster threat response across our farming footprint.
At a strategic level, what changes is the quality and speed of decision-making. That capability… the ability to act on information quickly and accurately, is increasingly central to how we compete.
The UAE is increasingly positioned as a hub for sustainable agriculture innovation. What role does the country play in Al Dahra’s global model, and how do you see that relationship evolving?
The UAE has been fundamental to Al Dahra’s development, and it remains central to our global model, though not principally as a farming location. What the UAE offers is something more valuable: a platform for leadership, innovation, and strategic connectivity that very few markets in the world can match.
Practically, our UAE presence includes the Fujairah Strategic Grain Terminal, with capacity to handle significant national import volumes; the state-of-the-art KEZAD rice factory; and digital and precision agriculture capabilities we develop locally and deploy globally. The UAE’s diplomatic relationships and commercial connectivity also enable us to operate effectively across Africa, the Americas, South Asia, and the wider MENA region.
I am passionate about the role the UAE can play at the frontier of sustainable agriculture innovation as the testing ground where the technologies, models, and partnerships that will define the next generation of global agriculture are developed and proven. The UAE as an innovation anchor, and our global farming platform as the deployment engine.
Agribusiness sits at the intersection of food, energy, and climate, three of the most-discussed themes globally. For investors looking at large-scale, sustainability-led agriculture, what should they be paying attention to right now?
Investors should first recognise that this is a long-term industry. The fundamentals, population growth, rising calorie demand, constrained land supply, water scarcity, are structural and compounding. But the capital must be patient. Building resilient, regenerative farming operations at scale takes time and sustained investment.
What they should be paying close attention to is the integration of the value chain. The most exposed businesses in this sector are those that farm in isolation, without the sourcing relationships, logistics infrastructure, and processing capabilities to see commodity through to the customer. That architecture of resilience is what investors should be probing for.
I would also highlight the intersection of sustainability and investability. Regenerative agriculture is not philanthropic positioning; it is financially rational. Healthier soils yield more with fewer inputs, and farms built on years of no-till practice are more productive and more resilient to climate stress. The metrics to watch are not just hectares and tonnes, but soil organic matter, water use efficiency, and carbon sequestration rates, the indicators that distinguish a platform built to compound over decades from one optimised for the current quarter.
You can read Al Dahra’s 2025 Sustainability Report at www.aldahra.com.
