For many years, the shortest path to food security seemed to be producing as much food as possible within the country’s borders. But the wheat experiment, water scarcity, and then the global food price shock of 2008 pushed Saudi Arabia toward a more complex formula: don’t produce everything—secure everything.

In a desert country, the phrase “self-sufficiency” can be reassuring in a way that is hard to resist. If a country produces everything it eats, it appears less exposed to crises abroad, price fluctuations, and supply disruptions.

But food does not come from land alone. It requires water, energy, capital, and labor—and some of these resources are scarcer than food itself.

This is the paradox that gradually led Saudi Arabia to redefine what food security means.

The Kingdom, which became a wheat exporter in the 1980s thanks to government subsidies, later grew more selective about what it cultivated domestically. Today, it produces more than it needs of some products, such as dairy and dates, and is rapidly expanding poultry production. At the same time, it imports grains, animal feed, oils, and raw sugar, while investing in food assets and companies beyond its borders.

This may seem contradictory. In fact, it is the essence of the new model.

Food security does not necessarily mean a country produces everything it eats. It means ensuring that it can obtain food from multiple sources, at an affordable cost, in ordinary times and during crises alike.

The wheat lesson

In the 1970s and 1980s, Saudi Arabia chose a direct path: increasing domestic agricultural production.

The state generously subsidized wheat farming, and the Kingdom became an exporter in the 1980s. This was a remarkable achievement for a country with little rainfall and an arid climate.

But the problem was not how much wheat was produced. It was the resource consumed to produce it.

Intensive farming in an arid environment depends heavily on groundwater. This water is not replenished as quickly as it is consumed.

Here, a classic economic problem emerged: a policy can succeed by one measure and fail by another.

If the measure is “How many tons of wheat do we produce?” the result was a success. But if the question is “How much water does it take to produce each ton, and is that use sustainable?” the picture is different.

And so the idea began to recede that full self-sufficiency was a goal to be achieved at any cost.

This shift in thinking may be more important than any single figure in the story of Saudi food.

Self-sufficiency and security are not the same thing

The difference between the two terms is simple, but fundamental.

Self-sufficiency measures how much a country produces domestically compared with how much it consumes. If consumption is one million tons and production is one million tons, the self-sufficiency rate is 100%.

Food security is a broader concept. It concerns people’s ability to consistently access enough safe food, whether it comes from a local farm, a domestic factory, a foreign supplier, or an investment in another country.

In theory, a country can achieve a high level of self-sufficiency while using its natural resources unsustainably. Another country may import a large share of its food but have multiple suppliers, strategic reserves, financial strength, and overseas investments—and therefore be more secure.

Saudi Arabia has gradually moved from the first model to the second.

The report describes this approach as “smart food security”: intensive domestic production of goods for which the Kingdom has an advantage or a strategic need, imports of water-intensive goods, and overseas investment to secure some supplies at the source.

Not every import is a weakness

In general economic discourse, rising imports are sometimes treated as automatic evidence of weakness. When it comes to food, this is an incomplete reading.

If producing a ton of a particular crop in the Kingdom consumes an extremely scarce water resource, while importing it costs less and preserves water for a higher-value activity, importing may be the more rational decision.

This explains the makeup of Saudi Arabia’s food basket today.

Domestic production is concentrated in goods such as dairy, poultry, eggs, dates, and greenhouse vegetables. Meanwhile, the Kingdom imports inputs such as animal feed, grains, crude oils, and raw sugar.

This is not a divide between “domestic success” and “import failure,” but between what is worth producing locally and what is not worth depleting resources to produce.

In economics, this is sometimes called comparative advantage: a country focuses its resources on activities it can carry out more efficiently, rather than trying to produce everything simply because it has the technical ability to do so.

But relying on the world comes at a cost

If full self-sufficiency is costly, importing carries risks too.

This became clear during the global food crisis of 2008, when prices rose and some countries imposed export restrictions. For importing countries, the crisis was a reminder that having money does not necessarily mean a product will be available when you need it.

This was an important turning point in Saudi thinking.

In 2009, the Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company, SALIC, was established as an investment arm working to secure overseas supply chains.

The idea is not simply to buy food, but to get closer to its source.

Rather than being a buyer at the end of the global market, the Kingdom can use investments and partnerships to own stakes in companies, assets, or production networks tied to its needs.

This is reflected in SALIC’s domestic and international investments, as well as its presence in international food and agriculture companies. The broader aim is to reduce the vulnerability of relying solely on the spot market.

When geography became part of the portfolio

This also changes the meaning of “domestic.”

In the traditional model, food security is domestic if the farm is within the country’s borders.

In the new model, the farm may be in Australia, Ukraine, or Brazil, but some of its ownership, production, or supply chain may be linked to a Saudi investor.

In this sense, geography itself has become part of risk management.

Instead of relying on one country, one supplier, or one shipping route, the goal is to build a network.

This matters because food risks are no longer just agricultural. They include wars, political tensions, shipping disruptions, climate, energy prices, currencies, and export restrictions.

For example, the report points to the concentration of some imports: Brazil for poultry and meat, India for rice, Ukraine and Russia for wheat and oils, and Australia for meat.

The more a product is concentrated in a single source, the greater the risk.

That is why diversification is as much a part of food security as production.

129% self-sufficient in dairy—but not in everything

Current figures help explain the philosophy.

The self-sufficiency rate for dairy products is about 129%, meaning the Kingdom produces more than it consumes domestically. For dates, the rate is about 119%. For shrimp, the report gives a figure of 147%.

Poultry production, meanwhile, rose from about 45% in 2016 to around 70% in 2024, with plans for further localization.

By contrast, self-sufficiency is about 61% for red meat and 48% for seafood.

These disparities are not necessarily a flaw in the policy. They reflect the fact that each product has a different economic profile.

The question is not why every figure does not reach 100%.

The better question is: For which products is reaching 100% economically and strategically beneficial, and for which does it become too costly?

A measured return to wheat

Wheat itself shows how policy has shifted from a binary choice—produce or don’t produce—to more precise management.

The report notes that domestic production rose from about 202,000 tons in 2019 to 1.2 million tons in 2023, covering around one-third of national needs.

But production did not return according to the old logic; it came with water-use controls.

In other words, the Kingdom has not abandoned domestic production, but it no longer separates it from the cost of resources.

This may be the essence of the model’s “smart” approach: the choice is not between importing and self-sufficiency, but finding the least vulnerable and most sustainable mix.

From agricultural security to industrial security

There is another, less visible shift: food security is no longer just about farms.

The more capable the Kingdom becomes of processing raw materials domestically, the more control it gains over a larger part of the food supply chain—even if some inputs come from abroad.

This explains why current policies aim to localize food industries, not just agriculture.

Importing wheat and then milling and processing it locally is economically different from importing the finished product. The same applies to importing crude oils or raw sugar and then processing them in the Kingdom.

The value retained locally includes the factory, jobs, packaging, storage, transport, brand, and profits.

That is why the report says the food trade balance should not be read as a bare figure: a deficit in inputs may be very different from a deficit in finished products.

Food security has become a network, not a stockpile

Strategic reserves remain important, but they are not enough on their own.

The Saudi model described in the article rests in practice on several overlapping layers: selective domestic production, local processing, imports from multiple markets, overseas investments, reserves, and government and development financing, alongside logistics, cold storage, ports, and distribution networks.

The system’s strength does not come from any one layer, but from the difficulty of all of them failing at the same time.

This is the difference between securing a commodity and building a food security system.

The first asks: How much wheat do we have?

The second asks: Where does the wheat come from? Who owns it? What are the alternatives? How large are the reserves? How does it reach the mills? Can the ports receive it? What happens if one supplier is disrupted?

The most mature policy is not the most self-sufficient

There is always a political temptation to turn self-sufficiency rates into a scoreboard: the closer the figure gets to 100%, the better the performance appears.

But resources do not work that simply.

If increasing self-sufficiency in a product consumes extremely scarce water or requires subsidies that exceed its economic value, the next percentage point of self-sufficiency may be more costly than it is beneficial.

But if the product is strategic and the Kingdom has genuine production capacity for it, or can build an export industry around it, raising self-sufficiency may be a rational investment.

That is why the most mature food policies are not necessarily those that produce everything.

They are the ones that also know what not to produce.

After decades of experience, Saudi Arabia appears to have moved from the simple question, “How do we produce our food?” to a more difficult one: “How do we secure our food with as little vulnerability as possible?”

And the answer is no longer a bigger farm.

It is a combination of farms, factories, ports, reserves, and overseas investment.

In this way, importing can sometimes be part of food security, not its opposite; and self-sufficiency becomes a tool to use where it makes sense, not a goal that overrides every other consideration.