Abstract
Agri-food markets are vital in achieving food security, especially for resource-poor, food-importing countries such as Qatar. The paper provides an overview of the evolution of agri-food markets in Qatar and explores the implications of past and ongoing changes in terms of food security and food system sustainability. In particular, the review analyzes drivers of changes, trends, and challenges as well as policy responses to address the emerging challenges while ensuring the country’s food security. It draws upon a systematic review of scholarly literature indexed in the Web of Science as well as data from gray literature (e.g., reports) and databases (e.g., FAOSTAT). Different drivers (e.g., population growth with huge expatriate inflow, urbanization, income increase) affected the functioning of agri-food markets as well as the structure of the food chain (viz. production, processing, distribution, consumption) in Qatar. In addition to drivers, the food-related trends were also shaped by numerous environmental (e.g., land/water scarcity), economic, health, and trade challenges. To ensure long-term food and nutrition security for its population, Qatar implemented various policies and strategies (e.g., National Food Security Strategy 2018–2023). In this context, agri-food markets, as functional links between production and consumption, can foster transition towards sustainable food consumption and production patterns in Qatar.
Highlights
Markets can be defined as the “collective devices that allow compromises to be reached, on the nature of goods to produce and distribute and on the value to be given to them” [1] (p. 1229)
The paper provides an overview of the evolution of agri-food markets in Qatar and explores the implications of past and ongoing changes in terms of food security and food system sustainability
Agri-food markets are vital in achieving food and nutrition security in resource-poor, food-importing countries such as Qatar
Summary
Markets can be defined as the “collective devices that allow compromises to be reached, on the nature of goods to produce and distribute and on the value to be given to them” [1] (p. 1229). Agri-food markets are vital in achieving food and nutrition security in resource-poor countries that depend on imports and trade to meet the food demand of their populations, such as the Near East and North African (NENA) countries. The geopolitical instability in the Gulf region, such as the Blockade of 2017, could threaten Qatar’s food supply [69,76,77,78,79] This makes Qatar an interesting case study to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of reliance on markets to achieve sustainable food and nutrition security. This review paper analyzes drivers of changes in agri-food markets and food consumption and production systems (Section 3), change patterns and trends (Section 4), and the challenges that they determine (Section 5), as well as policy responses to address the emerging challenges while ensuring the long-term food and nutrition security of the Qatari population (Section 6). The topics for the sections (viz. drivers, trends, challenges, policy responses) were established from the call for the special issue “Agri-food markets towards sustainable patterns: Trends, drivers, and challenges” [80] and its inaugural article [13]
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