The West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region faces a food security dilemma rooted in water scarcity, energy dependence, climate- and water-related shocks, conflict, and global market volatility.
As one of the world’s most land- and water-scarce regions, its capacity for domestic food production is constrained, contributing to heavy dependence on food imports, while several WANA countries also depend on imported oil and gas for electricity generation, transport, and energy-intensive water desalination (FAO 2022b; IEA 2025). These interconnected pressures affect people’s livelihoods and can undermine human, economic, and regional security.
Water scarcity is a particularly acute constraint. Average freshwater availability is approximately 480 cubic meters per person per year (World Bank 2025a), below the 500 cubic meter threshold for absolute water scarcity, while agriculture accounts for nearly 83 percent of available freshwater withdrawals (de Waal et al. 2023). Because agriculture consumes the vast majority of available freshwater, water scarcity directly constrains domestic food production and increases dependence on food imports.
Where water scarcity intersects with conflict and institutional fragility, its effects can extend well beyond food production. In Yemen, for example, long-standing groundwater depletion, combined with conflict and institutional collapse, has fueled local disputes over water and land, damaged critical infrastructure, reduced access to safe water, and deepened food insecurity and humanitarian need (Abo-Thrais et al. 2025). Energy dependence adds another layer of vulnerability. Imported sources supplied 74 percent of Jordan’s energy needs in 2024 (Jordan Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources 2025), Morocco’s energy-dependency ratio stood at 87.5 percent (Kingdom of Morocco 2024) and Lebanon imports nearly 97 percent of the energy it uses (World Bank 2026b).
Together, water scarcity, energy dependence, climate shocks, and conflict shape food security across the region—not only in terms of availability but also accessibility, affordability, and stability. Food may be available, but it remains inaccessible and unaffordable to many due to inflation, instability, and conflict. In Syria, more than 7 million people, around 29.5 percent of the population, are acutely food insecure (WFP 2026d, FAO 2026g). In Lebanon, around 874,000 people, roughly 17 percent of the population, were estimated to face crisis- level or acute food insecurity between November 2025 and March 2026 (FAO 2026d).
The region’s food trade patterns reveal a broader dilemma for food security. Many WANA countries export fruits, vegetables, olive oil, dates, and processed food, while importing essential staples such as wheat, maize, vegetable oils, sugar, and animal feed. Morocco and Jordan illustrate this dilemma: despite exporting high-value produce—including tomatoes, citrus fruits, squash, cucumbers, eggplants, apricots, and berries—they remain heavily dependent on cereal imports (World Bank n.d.a, World Bank n.d.b, FAO 2025a, FAO 2026e). The risk emerges when dependence on staple imports is concentrated among a group of suppliers, currencies, or transport routes. Disruptions can then pass rapidly from global markets to domestic prices, dietary quality, and household deprivation. In conflict- affected settings, damage to farms, roads, ports, water systems, and power networks magnifies this exposure. Food security therefore becomes a matter of economic resilience, public trust, and regional stability.
Addressing this dilemma requires an integrated understanding of resource security. A water–energy–food–ecosystems (WEFE) nexus approach recognizes that the objective is not simply to produce more, but to produce more efficiently and generate greater nutritional, economic, and social value from every unit of water and energy.
Priorities include reducing water losses, enhancing water productivity, expanding safe wastewater reuse, improving irrigation efficiency, supporting drought-resilient crops, and powering water and food systems with renewable energy. Nature-based solutions, such as watershed restoration, rainwater harvesting, and soil conservation, should be treated as productive infrastructure.
These interventions must become embedded within national and regional security and resilience planning, with benefits measured across natural resources, livelihoods, ecosystems, and human well-being. Resilience does not mean producing everything domestically. Rather, it means managing dependency strategically, diversifying suppliers and trade routes, increasing resource productivity, strengthening local capacities, and protecting people from overlapping deprivation.
Linking WEFE planning with multidimensional deprivation indicators can help identify populations exposed to multiple overlapping risks and better target resources and support. In the WANA region, water and energy security are not only prerequisites for food security, but also fundamental to dignity, stability, and human security. Investing in resilient water governance is therefore not only an environmental or economic priority—it is a security imperative.