Bread for berries
Mapping the Mediterranean’s food trade
Bread is at the heart of daily life in the Arab world. Flying from ovens and roadside kiosks; stacked high on breakfast, lunch, and dinner tables; even held aloft at protests, to symbolize the state’s failure to meet the most basic needs. It comes in many shapes and sizes, from the baguettes of Tunisia to the circular pita to Iraq’s fluffy, boat-shaped samoon. More and more, though, the region’s many breads have one thing in common: They rely on cheap wheat pouring in from Europe and Russia.
It wasn’t always so. Once upon a time, the region relied on its own wheat: hardy, nutritious varieties grown for millennia in the eastern and southern Mediterranean. The Arab world, in fact, did more than supply itself. It innovated and exported, helping bread find its way to diets and tables in Europe and, later, around the world.
Indeed, it was in the Fertile Crescent—which arcs from the Mediterranean shores of Palestine and Lebanon through modern-day Syria, Turkey, and Iraq—that humanity learned to cultivate grain. To the west, ancient Egyptians farmed wheat and barley along the Nile’s banks and delta. Egypt, the Levant, and North Africa all came to be known as “the granary of Rome,” for how they sustained the empire’s vast domains. Likewise, the Hawran plain, in what is now southern Syria and northern Jordan, was one of the Ottoman Empire’s breadbaskets.
Today, self-sufficiency truly feels like ancient history. In 2021, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) contained five of the top 15 wheat importing states in the world. Even small countries like Jordan and Tunisia somehow import enough to make it to the top 50. Data from the Organization of Economic Complexity (OEC) allows us to visualize this dependence among the region’s top importers: mapping out each country’s total wheat import bill, its top providers, its rank among global wheat importers, and how wheat itself ranks among a country’s main imports.
Import dependence has high costs. Year after year, cash-strapped Arab states spend scarce foreign exchange to import staples they once grew for themselves. Volatile world markets shape their ability to feed society. Indeed, the map above uses data from a year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; data from a year after would show a major shakeup to the region’s wheat supply chains, which was acutely felt in 2022 and 2023.
Import dependence has high costs. Year after year, cash-strapped Arab states spend scarce foreign exchange to import staples they once grew for themselves. Volatile world markets shape their ability to feed society. Indeed, the map above uses data from a year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; data from a year after would show a major shakeup to the region’s wheat supply chains, which was acutely felt in 2022 and 2023.
From feeding people to feeding Europe
What happened? How did the region flip so dramatically from wheat producer to consumer? It’s tempting to blame climate change and water scarcity, which indeed bode ill for MENA’s agriculture. Today, though, plenty of Arab states still have great conditions for growing wheat. Explosive population growth, coupled with rapid urbanization, are more compelling explanations, but still only part of the picture.
The bigger problem is that MENA governments have mostly stopped organizing agriculture in ways that feed their societies. Back in the mid-20th century, newly independent Arab states invested heavily in food self-sufficiency and pro-peasant redistribution of land, wealth, and services. Starting in the 1970s and 80s, the region swung toward the neoliberal reforms. Faced with rising debt and pressure from international lenders like the World Bank and IMF, most Arab states opted for privatization, declining support for small producers, and the rise of corporate farms growing cash crops for export.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Egypt. One of history’s great agricultural societies, Egypt now spends more money importing wheat than any other country in the world. It is also by far the world’s leading importer of ful or faba beans—along with bread, the most iconic staple in the Egyptian diet. That’s not to say Egyptians have stopped farming: It’s just that state policies have shifted toward promoting high value exports.
OEC data lets us visualize this shift. Here, Egypt’s wheat import bill is stacked up alongside a selection of its leading agricultural exports. The vertical bars reflect the total value of each import or export; the arrows indicate the leading trade partner for each good.
The results capture how far Egypt has moved toward importing staple goods and exporting cash crops. In 2021 it was among the world’s top 12 exporters of citrus, potatoes, strawberries, and cotton. All of these are irrigated, and some are notoriously water intensive. Selling them abroad effectively means selling the water that was pumped into them—exporting “virtual water” in technical speak. That sits awkwardly with the country’s deepening water crisis, and the fact that all those exports still pale in comparison to Egypt’s wheat import bill.
At the other edge of North Africa, Morocco faces a similar predicament. The kingdom is both a major wheat importer and a fruit producing powerhouse. It is among the globe’s top exporters of tomato and citrus, along with such thirsty luxuries as melon, berries, and avocados.
This swap—Moroccan fruits for European grains—works great for corporate exporters on both sides of the Mediterranean, and for European consumers savoring cheap berries. But it also runs up against Morocco’s yearslong drought, which has prompted the state to ration water in car washes and public hamams.
Morocco’s trade relations also shed light on what you could call a neocolonial current in the Mediterranean’s food trade: Its top trade partner, France, also happens to be its former colonizer, which continues to benefit from Morocco’s natural resources in the form of water intensive fruit.
Back in the eastern Mediterranean, Israel has mastered the science of high value agriculture. It relies on cutting-edge technology and its own brand of colonialism, through the illegal exploitation of land and water in Palestine and the Golan Heights. Its fruit exports largely go to European states, like France and the Netherlands, that have backed its war in Gaza. Along with Morocco, Israel is the other MENA state cashing in on Europe’s lust for avocados. Israeli and Moroccan companies have even teamed up to grow avocados on Moroccan soil with Moroccan water, via a joint venture that followed the two states’ normalization of relations in 2020.
Critically, though, Israel’s avocado sales are paltry compared to a much less sexy export: namely animal feed sold to a captive market in the occupied Palestinian territories, which depend on Israeli goodwill even to produce food locally. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has wielded such control over the flow of basic foodstuffs to repeatedly bring Gaza to the verge of famine.
If Israel sets the terms of its relations with its neighbors, Jordan has no such luxury. The country’s diminutive rivers carry the leftovers of Israeli and, to a lesser degree, Syrian agriculture. As a result, Amman, the capital, pipes in water from the Disi aquifer, which straddles Jordan’s border with the much bigger, stronger kingdom next door: Saudi Arabia. The latter also gulps Jordanian water indirectly, in the form of livestock and thirsty fruits grown by big Jordanian businesses and exported or smuggled across the border.
Jordan’s predicament thus mirrors that of Egypt and Morocco, on a smaller scale. While Jordanian society depends on subsidized bread made with cheap European wheat, its most powerful farmers grow fruits like peaches and nectarines to ship to the richer market next door. They are widely said to exploit high quality groundwater at will, free of the tight quotas that plague small producers.
Arguably, though, the region’s most nature-defying agricultural sector is Saudi Arabia’s. The desert kingdom has no rivers, almost no precipitation, and has for decades been depleting its fossil groundwater at alarming rates. Yet it also has by far the MENA’s largest dairy industry, exporting more than a billion dollars annually. Almarai—the Saudi dairy company whose name means “pastures”—is a household name in much of the Arab world.
But dairy cows, and the fodder needed to feed them, are among the
thirstiest agribusinesses. Rather than scale back, Almarai has snapped
up rights to land and water in such unlikely locations as Arizona and
Argentina.
Along with dairy products, Saudi Arabia was in 2021 the world’s top exporter of dates. This crop has a deep, rich history in the kingdom, particularly in its eastern oases. Today, though, irrigating dates means drawing down scarce water. And, as with dairy, revenue from these exports is meager compared to Saudi’s gargantuan energy sales. So why export so much water?
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The answer probably comes down to two factors, which apply as much to Saudi dates as to Jordanian nectarines, Egyptian strawberries, or Moroccan avocados. First, while the revenue from each crop—a few hundred million dollars per year, say—is marginal to a country’s overall trade balance, it’s good money for whoever does the exporting. Vested interests range from well-connected local growers to multinational agribusinesses, whose investment Arab regimes are keen to attract. In the region—as in other climate-stressed areas like southern Europe or the American West—those powerful actors will be the last ones to suffer from mismanagement of scarce water.
Second is the presumption that, whatever happens, the region will surely find its way out of a deepening water crisis. The oil rich Gulf has for decades lived lavishly beyond its hydrological means, thanks to the costly and polluting desalination of seawater. Technofixes appeal to leaders elsewhere in the region, even in states like Jordan and Egypt that lack the means to pursue them on such a massive scale.
Of course, such magical thinking is not confined to the Arab world. It permeates environmental policy globally, including in rich Western states that are most responsible for the present crisis and best placed to tackle it. But sooner or later, our climate will impose changes on what we eat and where we grow it. The question is whether we prepare for it in ways that shield the most vulnerable, rather than clinging to a system that serves those who need it least.
Alex Simon is Synaps' research director. Monica Basbous is a consultant with Synaps.