Attendees are responsible for booking their own rooms at the New York Hilton Midtown. Room reservations made by Thursday, May 23, 2019 will be eligible for the group rate of $399.00 plus applicable taxes and fees for single or double occupancy. The negotiated group rate is based on availability and applies to reservations for Sunday, June 9, 2019 through Wednesday, June 12, 2019.
Should businesses expect to rethink Chinese sourcing strategies? Will Chinese firms face similar pressures?
Chaired by Senior Practice Lead Rebecca Park
The MENA is an agro-ecologically diverse region. The Gulf region has no permanent rivers or lakes and minimal rainfall. Egypt and Iraq, by contrast have river systems that have supported agriculture for millennia. The region overall is the most water-scarce in the world, driving high levels of food import-dependence. Gulf states, for instance, import between 80-90% of all the calories they consume, and in some food categories, like cereals, they import 100% of their needs. Money is also a variable: the oil-rich Gulf states have far greater purchasing power than their peers in North Africa and the Levant.
The Ukraine war has brought about overlapping debt and food crises for the MENA’s energy importers. For two of the region’s most indebted countries, Egypt and Tunisia, an inflated food import bill has weakened their ability to service debt just as higher interest rates globally have made this more expensive. The resulting pressure on dollar reserves has increased sovereign default risks, forcing both Tunisia and Egypt to turn to the IMF for bailouts. Lebanon had already defaulted on its debt in 2020.
The problems of Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia, moreover, are of both affordability and accessibility. Not only must they pay for food imports (with dwindling dollar reserves), but their long-standing dependence on imports of wheat from Russia and Ukraine makes them especially susceptible to blockages in the Black Sea region. Before the war, Egypt, Lebanon and Tunisia imported 80%, 70% and 50%, respectively, of their wheat needs from Russia and Ukraine.
With memories of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, governments are looking for measures to address food inflation at its roots. A mix of war and climate change suggest that MENA governments should prepare for multiple points of potential breadbasket failure. This will require an approach to food security that prioritises diluting the concentration of imports from a single food-producing region, not least the Black Sea. MENA governments are also concluding that they have a key interest in maintaining the multinational food trading system that is crucial to their commodity supply. This will be key to avoiding the types of export restrictions that, among other factors, gave rise to the 2011 global food crisis – and which have led to artificial shortages of food in the current crisis.
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