Water Scarcity and Food Import: A Case Study for Southern Mediterranean Countries

Taking six southern Mediterranean countries as a case study, this paper addresses the water-food challenges facing water-scarce countries and the implications for the world food economy. By accounting the volume of virtual water embedded in food imports into the countries concerned, a close relationship between water endowment and food import dependence is elaborated. A projection of the cereal demand suggests an increment of 40–60 percentage points in these countries by 2020 above their 1998–99 levels, raising the aggregate volume of cereal imports to around 40 million tons. The analysis also finds that the trend of shifting from staple grain crops to higher-value cash crops was weak during the past two decades. A deteriorating trade deficit for both cereal and noncereal agricultural products was evident in almost all the countries, suggesting a rigid and persistent constraint of water scarcity on overall agricultural development. The results of this case study highlight two important points: (a) food imports are imperative for compensating water resource deficiency; (b) water scarcity-related food imports will continue to expand and impose increasing impacts on the global food economy.