Most scholarship on natural resources geopolitics in the Middle East has long focused on oil, water hegemony within disputed river basins, and, to a lesser extent, gas pipeline politics. Amid a growing public policy and academic consensus that water, energy, and food (WEF) are fundamentally interdependent and should not be investigated as disparate phenomenon, Eckart Woertz has written a well-researched book about the contemporary dynamics of food supply in some of the most water-scarce oil exporting countries of the region. The book, which is easy to read yet intellectually rigorous, comprises a short introduction, a chapter explaining why the author began studying food policies following the 2008 financial crisis, two main parts, and a conclusion.
The introduction and first chapter set the scene. As regional droughts reduced local food supply and major food producing nations imposed temporary export controls amid the 2008 recession, Gulf states were painfully reminded of their acute reliance on food imports. The author summarized the prevailing political economy of the Middle East at the time as such: “[o]il and gas revenues supply the bulk of the country's foreign currency that finances the growing food imports of the region, not only in the Gulf countries, but also in other exporter nations like Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, the two Sudans, and Yemen.” (3).
Like many area studies books, Oil for Food ascribes much importance to local systems of political economy because, as the author explains, it continues to influence policy-making (36). Part One outlines the post-World War II history of the Arab states’ food conundrum. Focusing on the Gulf Arab countries, Woertz articulates how and why this history of food insecurity and strategic vulnerability has developed, and how this matter is now perceived and managed.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the Gulf had become part of a global food commodity market and reliant on agricultural imports, especially from Egypt. However, after the Allies transformed the regional food trade networks to serve the war effort, there were food shortages and famines in the region during WWII. Even as Gulf states gained political independence from the U.K., regional political elites knew all too well that food could be wielded against them again. In the 1960s, the United States used its “Food For Peace Program” to influence Egyptian foreign policy, and in the 1970s, it threatened to retaliate against the Saudi-led oil embargo with a “grain embargo.” In this context, the Gulf states have aggressively pursued agricultural modernization, introducing generous subsidy programs and making various strategic investments. In the case of Saudi Arabia, government support enabled the country to become the world's sixth largest wheat exporter by the early 1990s. Due to a lack of economic and environmental sustainability, however, these self-sufficiency projects amounted to “white-elephants,” i.e., large and poorly designed modernization projects that could survive only because of the state's generous support through subsidies and other incentives such as free land lots, interest-free loans, and production buying contracts. Eventually, the depletion of Saudi Arabia's groundwater aquifers to dangerous levels convinced the government to phase out most agricultural subsidies by the late 2000s.
In Part Two, the book discusses more recent food security projects and analyzes some of the most prominent international agro-investments made by the Gulf states. The author carefully deconstructs what he considers “media hype” around alleged land grabs that were thought to have deprived Africans of their land and livelihoods. In Sudan and elsewhere, the book documents instead a series of ambitious plans and international agro-investments that have only produced disappointment and stark failures due to poor planning, political instability, and a lack of infrastructure and local resources. In the final chapter, the author offers his insights as to how Gulf states could better address food security in the future, not the least with better prepared agro-investments that can benefit both investors and local smallholders.
Woertz paints a bleak picture of food security in the Middle East mentioning in the introduction and forward the issues of recurring droughts, water stress, climate change, and subsidy cuts. He also argues that the 2008 food crisis marks the beginning of a trend of permanently higher food prices as global food demand continues to grow. The author, however, overlooks the possibility that agricultural innovation could radically alter the region's food destiny. Hydro- and aquaponics projects currently thriving in the region receive perhaps too little attention in the book, although the climate change and water shortage risks that are emphasized in it do present very real threats to the region. While it is too early to say whether the book is overly pessimistic, it is undoubtedly well researched and documented with precise case studies and solid scientific references, such as reports from the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change.
Eckart Woertz's remarkable book has already become a reference for students of food security in the Middle East and beyond, and in the context of contemporary geopolitical events, its theses seem to be borne out. Soon after the so-called “Arab Spring,” several conflicts erupted in the Middle East where food has been openly used as a weapon of war. In Syria, Yemen, and, more recently, Qatar, with its recent diplomatic spat with Saudi Arabia and its allies, food has been leveraged as a strategic tool of geopolitics and regime survival. Such developments confirm Woertz's thesis that food is a strategic and fundamentally political commodity, similar in that way to oil. At the same time, these events and trends also demand an update to this admirable reference book, as they have deeply affected food production, regional trade, and models of political economy since its publication in 2013.
