Food Security Strategy, Macroeconomic Dynamics and Food Import Sensitivity in Qatar

ABSTRACT Qatar has limited agricultural land and water resources and therefore remains highly dependent on food imports. This structural dependency makes Qatar vulnerable to external shocks such as the recent Gulf crisis, threatening food security and disrupting global supply chains. In response to previous shocks, Qatar started implementing a National Food Security Plan in 2014 to strengthen resilience, improve self‐sufficiency, and streamline food imports. So far, the short‐run and long‐run effects of the strategy on food imports remain underexplored. Using 26 years of quarterly data, this study applies Dynamic Autoregressive Distributed Lag and Kernel‐based Regularized Least Squares models to examine food import behavior. Results show that short‐run responses to exchange rates and income shocks are generally insignificant, while higher global prices immediately reduce cereal and dairy imports but not vegetable imports. In the long run, exchange rate appreciation significantly increases imports across all three commodity groups, higher global prices reduce imports, and domestic production lowers import dependence for cereals and vegetables but expands alongside dairy imports. Overall, Qatar's food security strategy appears to operate through gradual and sector‐specific adjustment mechanisms rather than immediate import substitution, underscoring the value of nonlinear modelling frameworks in policy evaluation.