ECKART WOERTZ
Fellow
Princeton University
ARAB FOOD SHOULD BE PRODUCED with “Arab capital, Arab land, and Arab water,” argues Turki Faisal Al Rasheed, A Saudi agro-businessman. However, there is not enough water available in the Middle East for food self-sufficiency. The region lost the ability to grow all its needed food from renewable water resources in the 1970s. Water-scarce areas like the Arabian Peninsula, Israel, and Palestine passed this point in the 1950s. The recourse of mining fossil water aquifers is unsustainable, and the day of reckoning is drawing closer. Serious steps at water preservation need to be undertaken.
Food security is widely equated with food self-sufficiency in the Middle East. A fragile dependence on food imports during World War II and an embargo-happy United States that politicized the food trade in the 1970s have informed a perception that food security can be suddenly under threat and that global markets cannot be trusted. Domestic agro-lobbies in the Middle East also argue for self-reliance in order to defend subsidies and access to scarce resources like water. If “drill baby drill” is the panacea proposed by some Americans for the United States energy woes, “plant baby plant” is the rallying cry of an equally convinced crowd in the Middle East.
In the United States like in the Middle East, such slogans fly in the face of factor endowments—resource independence is not an option. America, as the world’s largest oil consumer, is in a relationship of energy interdependence with the largest oil-producing region, the Persian Gulf. The Middle East, on the other hand, has a similar dependence on food exporters like the United States, Russia and Australia
Saudi Arabia has decided to phase out its subsidized wheat production by 2016. As recently as the early 1990s, it was the world’s sixth largest wheat exporter because of wasteful cultivation of water-intensive crops in the desert. Arguably, groundwater depletion is an even more pressing issue in the Middle East than contentious cross-border sharing of surface water along the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, and Jordan Rivers. As agriculture consumes approximately 80 percent of water in the Middle East, the easiest way to save water is to reduce agriculture and instead direct scarce water resources to meet more urgent or valuable needs such as residential or commercial consumption.
Rather than leading to a Malthusian Armageddon, the lack of water has been compensated for by food imports. As crops consume water to grow, the water-scarce Middle East has the option to import from water-rich countries “virtual water” that is embedded in food produce, most notably in cereals like wheat, barley, and rice. This necessary precondition for food security in the Middle East will increase in importance. Population growth will only level out after 2050, and domestic agriculture will stay flat at best. As long as other countries produce enough exportable surplus and the Middle East has the money to pay for it on sufficiently open markets, there is no problem. No one needs to go to bed hungry as long as lower classes’ access to food is assured by pro-poor growth policies and safety nets. If food security is measured by daily calorie intake, per capita income, and food import coverage by exports, Middle Eastern countries are remarkably food secure. In fact, the most water-scarce countries in the Gulf are the most food secure. If anything, they have a problem with too many calories consumed: their per capita ratios of diabetes and obesity are among the highest in the world. The only Arab countries that face severe food security challenges are Yemen, Sudan, and Iraq.
Yet, reality does not exist, only different perceptions of it. The perception of Gulf countries is that their food security is threatened. The reality is that rising food prices in the wake of the global food crisis were easy for them to stomach with oil prices exceeding $100 per barrel. Gulf countries do not face the same challenges as their poor cousins in the north of the Arab world. However, the temporary export restrictions by food exporters like Argentina, Russia, India, and Vietnam in 2008 had an immense psychological impact. Gulf countries now face the specter that some day they might not be able to secure enough food imports at any price even if their pockets are lined with petrodollars. This has reinforced the impression that food security is too important to be left to markets. Yet the penchant for politics in the Arab security debate has prompted approaches that are unsustainable and expensive.
Access to affordable food is an important part of the social contract in any country—the Middle East is no exception. Nowhere was this phenomenon more noticeable that during the Arab Spring protests. The immediate cause of protests in Algeria was raising food prices. In Kuwait, the Emir announced 14 months of free staple foods for nationals as part of a general subsidy package. In Egypt, food subsidies have been a bone of contention in domestic politics since the bread riots of 1977. Gulf countries have reiterated their determination to increase strategic food storage up to six months and more. The United Arab Emirates has tried to rein in food prices by announcing price controls for staple foods, and retailers increasingly grumble about resulting losses. Saudi Arabia has also addressed the issue with a mixture of subsidies and price controls. In 2008, the Saudi Minister of Commerce and Industry made the mistake of replying nonchalantly to public complaints about rising food prices. He said there were nineteen types of rice and that “it is not compulsory for people to eat the most expensive. “King Abdullah’s reaction was swift: fire the minister, enact a rice subsidy, hike government salaries, and tell critics to control their tone.
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