The 2009 financial crisis came on the heels of the global food crisis of 2008. Both generated high-profile reaction in the Middle East, particularly among the Gulf Arab states. Fears of spikes in food prices and declining growth led to brash announcements by various governments. Some rolled out subsidy plans, others attempted to negotiate prices with grocery retailers, and still others announced programs to buy farmland overseas. The popular worries were tangible yet the actual politics and economics behind these policies were less clear. Eckart Woertz's book steps back from those heady days to chart the broader history and political-economy dynamics of food in the Middle East.

The study of food politics at the regional level has generally been pursued through industry or nongovernmental organization projects, and in this respect Woertz's book is charting new ground. In doing so, he successfully incorporates and builds upon earlier scholarly work, particularly on the Gulf and Sudan. Of course, one challenge in breaking new thematic ground on food politics in the Middle East relates to scope. Oil for Food does not provide a comprehensive overview of this issue across the region, but rather focuses on the Gulf Arab states and linkages to international food politics. While the Gulf, like much of the Middle East, is reliant on food imports, the oil exporters suffer not from food insecurity but from a form of too much security resulting in a rise in nutritionally linked health problems like obesity and diabetes. Still, much of the 2008 hand wringing over food price increases has a history.

Woertz analyzes three historical phases as backdrops to the current dynamics: early Gulf food crises, U.S. food policy in the Middle East, and the 1970s Sudanese breadbasket policies. The first section explores food history in the Gulf from the 1940s through the 1990s. While emphasizing events in Saudi Arabia, Woertz treats imperial designs as integral to vacillations in price and supply during World War II. Fears over food security in the Gulf were linked to British policies in South Asia, one of the region's main suppliers. Allied powers established the Middle East Supply Center to manage and direct wartime trade, food in particular. Emergent political leaders in the Gulf were keen to ensure external food policies would serve, not impede, their domestic political security. Building on work by Robert Vitalis and Toby Jones, Woertz shows how food supplies figured in the early encounter between Saudi leaders and American oil companies. These relations in the 1940s led to later efforts by Saudi Arabia to achieve food security through self-sufficiency. The infamous Al-Kharj farms and wheat farming projects exemplified such efforts, but Woertz never exactly clarifies the policy intent of self-sufficiency. On the one hand, a recurring theme in the book is the claim that Gulf policies are rooted in fears of a return to crises of the 1940s and American threats to use food as a weapon. On the other hand, Woertz makes convincing arguments that much of the Saudi effort toward wheat production was tied more to patronage politics than to food security concerns.

The section on U.S. food policy and the Middle East is a concise and excellent review of shifts in American policies in the Cold War context. Food trade was used as a tool of foreign policy, and it was advanced as a reaction to the 1970s oil crisis and balance of payments worries. However, the effort to link that history to a “collective unconscious” among Gulf leaders that drives self-sufficiency today is more asserted than demonstrated. Even if the core factors influencing Gulf food policies are not quite wrapped up, the final two chapters do a thorough job of demonstrating why these policies have not progressed as hoped. Woertz analyzes the Sudanese government's failure to turn the country into an agricultural exporter for the rest of the region. Emphasizing practical as well as sociopolitical complications of land tenure shifts, the failure in Sudan foreshadowed problems with similar offshore solutions decades later. Post-2008 plans for purchasing farming resources in Pakistan, the Philippines, and Ethiopia have never been implemented. Most of the Arab World, and particularly the Gulf, continues to import food from leading exporters and international agro businesses.

Woertz's book is carefully and broadly researched. It will appeal to those interested in the political economies of food in the region as well as to students of the region's transnational linkages and pressures.