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Food Security in the MENA Region: Does Agriculture Performance Matter?

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Emerging Challenges to Food Production and Security in Asia, Middle East, and Africa

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how the agriculture sector could affect—or not—food security in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Empirical evidence on the macroeconomic determinants of food security, based on the FAO’s four pillars, namely availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability, has been provided. In addition, a panel data model for each pillar over the period 1990–2017 has been constructed, by adopting the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach to estimate the relationship between all variables. It was found that the determinants of food security in the MENA vary according to the adopted pillars. Also, food security in this region depends not only on agricultural factors, but essentially on various macroeconomic factors, such as the trade openness and international food prices, which may affect directly or indirectly the country’s food security position, regardless of its dependency on agriculture or oil sector.

The views expressed in this chapter are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as those of the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy and the National Bank of Kuwait.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this chapter, the agriculture-dependent countries are Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, while the net oil exporters are Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.

  2. 2.

    For more details, see Arellano and Bond (1991), Bond (2002), Baltagi (2001, pp. 131–135) and Blundell and Bond (1998).

  3. 3.

    For more details, see Beck and Levine (2004) and Roodman (2009).

  4. 4.

    The net oil exporters in our panel data are Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Bank of Kuwait, Kuwait, Kuwait

    Assil El Mahmah

  2. Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy (MASEN), Rabat, Morocco

    Amine Amar

Authors
  1. Assil El Mahmah
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  2. Amine Amar
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Law, Economics and Social Science, Ibn Zohr University and CERES, Agadir, Morocco

    Mohamed Behnassi

  2. Prince Sultan Institute for Environmental, Water and Desert Research, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Mirza Barjees Baig

  3. College of Law, Economics and Social Science, Hassan II University, Casablanca, Morocco

    Mahjoub El Haiba

  4. University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

    Michael R. Reed

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Mahmah, A.E., Amar, A. (2021). Food Security in the MENA Region: Does Agriculture Performance Matter?. In: Behnassi, M., Barjees Baig, M., El Haiba, M., Reed, M.R. (eds) Emerging Challenges to Food Production and Security in Asia, Middle East, and Africa. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72987-5_4

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