Global Food Crisis: Middle East Oil Impact on Food Supply | Analysis & Solutions

The book provides a new and surprising perspective on the Middle East, something different from the usual diet of Islamism and general mayhem. I was not aware that the Middle East is such a large food importer and that food has influenced politics in the region to such an extent in recent history.In the first part the book outlines how the global food crisis of 2008 affected countries in the Middle East. It analyzes their dependence on global food systems and how this dependence might develop in the future given constraints like water scarcity and climate change. It then shows why countries in the Middle East are so freaked out about food supply disruptions by analyzing how fragile their reliance on foreign supplies has been in the past (e.g. in World War II or in the 1970s when the US considered a food boycott in retaliation to the Arab oil embargo).In the second part the book deals with land grabs of Gulf countries in Africa and elsewhere. It is contrarian as it claims that most of them have actually not happened, because there has been a gap between announcements and actual investments. This is somewhat different from what has been written in media reports, which the author criticizes, but he does so in detail and relies on many first hand accounts and sources. To be fair he also points to many negative examples where such investments have actually been realized, especially in Sudan. Gulf countries tried to develop the country as an Arab breadbasket in the 1970s already. The book discusses this episode and current investments in a specific chapter.The book reads easily without too much jargon. The historic parts and the first hand accounts make it lively. It provides a new approach to the analysis of the region and there is a lot of stuff that is new even to experts of the Middle East. My only qualms are with the heavy Gulf focus. Some other countries are analyzed as well (e.g. Egypt, Iran, Iraq), but a bit more on these countries and particularly Syria would have been good.