The Arab world is the most water-scarce region on the planet, with less than 5% arable land and worsening desertification that is steadily narrowing the region’s food-growing capacity, according to UN agency officials. Food imports could account for nearly two-thirds of Arab region consumption by 2031, a dependency that leaves the region’s food security tied to international markets and shipping routes it does not control.
Some Gulf states already import more than 90% of what they eat, a structural reality of arid climates rather than a recent policy failure. Ahmad Mukhtar of the Food and Agriculture Organization described the region bluntly: it is “the most water-scarce region… experiencing some of the highest desertification” rates anywhere. For countries in this position, Arab world food security has never meant growing enough food domestically, but managing import dependency wisely and building reserves against price shocks.
Egypt illustrates the financial scale of that dependency. The country imports roughly half its wheat, at a cost of $3 billion to $4 billion (roughly £2.4 billion to £3.2 billion) annually, while its agricultural exports earn about $12 billion (approximately £9.6 billion) a year, a trade pattern that leaves it a net agricultural exporter overall even as it remains structurally reliant on imported staples such as wheat and cooking oil.
Where the pressure falls hardest
The burden of water and food insecurity is not evenly distributed across the region. Yemen, Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Libya face the most acute vulnerability, countries where conflict has compounded existing water stress by damaging irrigation infrastructure and displacing farming communities from land they have worked for generations. Undernourishment rates in these conflict-affected Arab countries run roughly four times higher than in the region’s non-conflict states, a gap that reflects how directly war disrupts food systems built on already scarce water.
Samer AbdelJaber of the World Food Programme linked the climate and conflict pressures directly: “Climate shocks are reducing crop yields, damaging livelihoods and increasing food prices.” More than 47 million people across the Middle East and North Africa lacked basic access to drinking water as of the most recent count, and nine in ten children in the region live in areas of high or extremely high water stress, according to UNICEF figures cited alongside the assessment.
UNICEF’s Omar El-Hattab argued the crisis is not a matter of missing solutions but of follow-through. Reaching a child with water only after supply has already failed misses the point, he said; the responsibility is to prevent that failure in the first place, through infrastructure and planning rather than emergency response once shortages have already taken hold in a community.
Desalination has become the default engineering response across wealthier Gulf states, but it remains energy-intensive and largely unaffordable for the poorer, conflict-affected countries where the crisis is most acute, leaving a widening gap between how the region’s richer and poorer states can respond to the same underlying water shortage. Food self-sufficiency, FAO officials stressed, is “simply not a feasible option” for most Arab countries given their water constraints, which reframes the policy question away from growing more and toward importing smarter, storing better and protecting the trade routes the region depends on.
As El Niño-linked disruption threatens grain harvests as far away as Latin America this season, a region already importing most of its food has limited room to absorb further price shocks from suppliers thousands of kilometres away, whatever the cause.
