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Sat, Jan 24, 2026 | Shaban 5, 1447 | Fajr 05:44 | DXB 
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Abu Dhabi builds AI network to support farmers across climate-hit regions
The approach addresses a fundamental challenge: The world produces enough food to feed everyone, yet as many as 720 million people went hungry in 2024.
According to Unicef, more than 295 million people in 53 countries and territories experienced acute food insecurity in 2024, largely due to extreme weather events. To help address this challenge, the UAE is building an AI network to support farmers across climate-hit regions.
Abu Dhabi is building the infrastructure itself — training AI researchers, developing open-source models, hosting collaborative hubs, and establishing field deployment networks. The AI network has already reached 38 million farmers and is aiming to triple that number by 2030.
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The approach addresses a fundamental challenge: The world produces enough food to feed everyone, yet as many as 720 million people went hungry in 2024. The problem isn't quantity — it's information, logistics, and timing. When farmers can't predict monsoons or frost, they plant at the wrong time and lose entire harvests.
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"The UAE is all very familiar with what food security means," Fatima Al Mulla, senior specialist at the UAE Presidential Court, told Khaleej Times. "We're a country that faces really harsh weather conditions, lack of water, high soil salinity. It's very difficult for us to be producing food. So the importance of it was just a natural fit."
That lived experience shaped Abu Dhabi's AI ecosystem for global agricultural development, announced earlier this month. The initiative brings together Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), NYU Abu Dhabi, ai71, and the CGIAR AI Hub — institutions that collectively span research, product development, and field deployment.
The scale achieved so far demonstrates viability. Through AIM for Scale, jointly funded by the UAE and Gates Foundation, India delivered AI-powered monsoon forecasts via SMS to 38 million farmers in 2025. The programme mobilised $1 billion to expand weather forecasting services across climate-vulnerable regions.
"We've reached up to 38 million farmers," Al Mulla said. "Our goal is 100 million by 2030."
That target becomes urgent against current food security trends. One in five people in Africa now faces chronic hunger, with levels rising across the continent except Eastern Africa. Afghanistan faces severe crisis with 11.6 million people — 25 per cent of the population — struggling to access adequate food, exacerbated by droughts that now occur every other year instead of once every three years.
AI for food security
The UAE's ecosystem tackles this through four interconnected initiatives. MBZUAI's Institute for Agriculture and Artificial Intelligence serves as a digital advisory hub, offering tools and training to governments and NGOs supporting 43 million smallholder farmers. The CGIAR AI Hub, hosted in Abu Dhabi by ai71, leverages 50 years of agricultural data from 13 global research centers. AgriLLM, an open-source AI model developed by ai71, was trained on 150,000 agricultural documents to provide crop-specific guidance.
The SMS-based delivery model addresses connectivity barriers in rural areas. "A lot of farmers do have some sort of phones, whether it's a smartphone or not," Al Mulla explained. "What's great about the information that we're able to provide farmers is that these are being sent through SMS messages."
Technology alone doesn't guarantee adoption. Al Mulla, who has worked directly with farmers in climate-vulnerable regions, emphasised building trust as the critical challenge. "They need to be able to feel that they can trust you to actually rely on information, because at the end of the day, it's about their livelihoods," she said. "For them, if they get the wrong information, they lose so much money."
The global context makes this work increasingly urgent. Despite marginal progress, systemic changes needed to manage risks at the nexus of food, climate, and national security have gained little traction. Global spending on agriculture increased in 2024, but only proportionally — the percentage share remained stagnant at 2.3 per cent of overall spending.
"The UAE is a great convener where we have the ability to bring countries and people together," Al Mulla said. "We have great credibility and there's great trust with us. That in itself is huge when you're working with the international community."
The partnership builds on the UAE-Gates Foundation's previous health initiatives, including polio eradication efforts. "There is that credibility and that trust and experience there," Al Mulla added. "And now we want to expand that to also agriculture and food."
Capacity-building
MBZUAI and the University of Chicago launched an AI Weather Forecasting Training Program in Abu Dhabi, training officials from Bangladesh, Chile, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria, with plans to expand to 25 countries by 2027. This capacity-building approach aims to create sustainable local systems rather than dependent relationships.
The inefficiency driving the work remains stark. "A third of the greenhouse gas emissions comes from our food systems, and a third of all of the food that's produced actually gets wasted," Al Mulla noted. "But there's still over 700 million people who go hungry at night. For me, that means that there is an issue, not with the quantity, but with the efficiency."
Success, according to Al Mulla, means transforming Abu Dhabi into "a place where you can harness the power of technology and AI to provide solutions to farmers" and reaching "not just thousands of farmers, but hundreds of millions of farmers" who can make better decisions based on accessible information.
Ahmed Waqqas Alawlaqi
Ahmed Waqqas Alawlaqi is the youngest Special Correspondent, reporting from Abu Dhabi on youth, AI and innovation, and human-interest stories. His work brings exclusive perspectives from the Capital, highlighting voices that shape the UAE's future.
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