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Countries in the Mediterranean appear trapped in a calculated, self-inflicted crisis. Those on southern shores systematically drain finite-capacity aquifers to cultivate luxury exports for foreign consumers, while simultaneously surrendering their food security to volatile global grain markets.
This is not environmental misfortune but an engineered outcome of decades of policy choices prioritizing export revenues and external interests over national water resilience and domestic sustenance. The sheer magnitude of this engineered dependency defies sustainability.
Consider Egypt, for instance, which is already categorized as a water-scarce country. It holds the dubious distinction of being the planet’s single largest importer of wheat, spending billions in precious foreign currency simply to secure the basic flour it needs for its state-subsidized bread, a cornerstone of social stability consumed by millions daily.
Yet, simultaneously, Egypt ranks among the world’s Top 12 exporters of citrus fruits, potatoes, strawberries, and cotton. Each of these crops demands a staggering amount of irrigation in an environment where every drop of water is contested.
Exporting a single tonne of strawberries or a bale of Egyptian cotton effectively ships thousands of precious cubic meters of the nation’s dwindling water reserves, primarily to European supermarkets.
What emerges is a financial calculus that reveals a profound distortion; the collective annual revenue generated by these “high-value” agricultural exports falls drastically short of covering the colossal, ever-increasing bill for imported wheat.
This gap is further widened by population growth and the immense fiscal burden of bread-subsidy programs, which are essential, yet unsustainable, props for fragile social contracts.
It is a pattern replicated across other parts of the Mediterranean’s southern shores. Morocco, for instance, in the midst of persistent droughts severe enough to mandate water rationing in urban areas, paradoxically functions as a mega-exporter of water-thirsty tomatoes, citrus, melons, berries, and avocados.
Its primary trading partner for this exchange is Europe, eerily perpetuating an extractive dynamic disguised as free trade. Meanwhile, lucrative profits flow to private exporters and satisfy European consumer demand for off-season luxury produce, but the true cost is borne by depleted aquifers and communities facing shrinking water quotas.
Similarly, Jordan, drawing down the shared Al-Dissi aquifer that is under the strain of scarcity, channels high-quality groundwater into growing peaches and nectarines, again for export. A common trend begins to emerge in which water-thirsty goods are prioritized over achieving relative domestic food sovereignty.
Israel has even managed to take things a step further. Jerusalem not only leverages its prowess and contested control over land and water resources to dominate high-value fruit exports to supportive European markets. Capitalizing on an ongoing “avocado boom,” while exerting near total control over the food supplies of subjugated neighboring territories, it essentially weaponizes sustenance and robs surviving Gazans of the ability to achieve food and water security on their own terms.
So why do states persist in these self-destructive exchanges, given the region’s acute water distress amid the worsening effects of climate change?
It is a slow-bleed crisis in which the most vulnerable are the first to pay as aquifer levels fall and soaring bread prices rip up social contracts.
Hafed Al-Ghwell
Firstly, follow the water — and the money. The conversion of arid landscapes into export-oriented plantations did not happen spontaneously; it was engineered through decades of deliberate policy shifts.
Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating into the 1980s, international financial institutions imposed structural adjustment programs that demanded the privatization of state assets, the dismantling of farming subsidies, and wholesale reorientation toward foreign exchange generation.
This created an agricultural aristocracy: large-scale agribusinesses and politically connected landowners who secured preferential access to subsidized water and prime land.
In Egypt, while smallholders faced crippling energy price hikes for irrigation pumps following subsidy cuts mandated by the International Monetary Fund, forcing many to abandon farming, elite exporters flourished by cultivating water-guzzling strawberries bound for European supermarkets, using state-subsidized infrastructure.
This contrasts sharply with the diffuse, long-term societal cost of depleted aquifers and a staggering national food import bill. Egypt’s annual wheat expenditure alone dwarfs the collective revenue from its famed citrus and potato exports.
Today, exporters form a potent lobby, thereby ensuring policies continue to prioritize their water-intensive cash crops over staples for local consumption, directly undermining national food resilience.
Secondly, a dangerous technological fatalism appears to have invaded the region’s policy-setting circles. Wealthier countries have conjured a myth of infinite hydrological adaptation through massive, energy-intensive seawater desalination projects. This creates a convenient illusion for leaders in less affluent, and increasingly parched, countries that future megaprojects will absolve them from the need to confront the unsustainable water exports of today.
This partly explains why drought-stricken Morocco continues to expand its water-thirsty avocado orchards. And, why Jordan continues to extract water from non-renewable aquifers at rates far exceeding the ability to replenish, to supply farms growing fruit for export while clinging to hopes of large-scale desalination, despite lacking the fiscal capacity or sources of sustainable energy to deploy it meaningfully.
Such cognitive dissonance is jarring, since present-day policymakers actively accelerate water depletion for short-term export gains, while banking on unaffordable or ecologically questionable technologies to bail them out later.
This “magical thinking” ignores a harsh arithmetic: the energy cost and environmental footprint of desalinating seawater for basic survival would be exponentially higher than the water that is effectively, and recklessly, exported today in every tonne of off-season berries or citrus fruit.
The end result is a system that functions as a slow-motion crisis transfer, extracting irreversible natural capital from the South to subsidize stability and abundance in the North. European consumers gain year-round access to affordable luxury: Moroccan winter strawberries retailing for €2.50 ($3) a kilogram in Parisian supermarkets; Israeli avocados shipped to Dutch tables; all irrigated with water sourced from aquifers that might require millennia to replenish.
Simultaneously, Southern Mediterranean elites and transnational agribusinesses secure reliable profits. Moroccan tomato exporters and Egyptian cotton magnates operate with state-subsidized water allocations that distort true resource costs.
Meanwhile, the ecological and economic foundations of water-stressed countries undergo systematic erosion. Fossil aquifers are drained. Local food systems atrophy as once-thriving milling industries across Iraq, Syria and Palestine have collapsed, forcing “Fertile Crescent” countries to become flour importers despite their proximity to the historical heartlands of wheat.
Water flows perpetually uphill toward power and capital. The true cost of this — which can be measured in depleted water reserves, escalating import bills, lost agricultural resilience, and the deepening vulnerability of the majority — is borne by the populations and the very ecological stability of these countries.
Each tonne of exported citrus uses 560 cubic meters of irreplaceable Egyptian groundwater. Each hectare of Moroccan avocados consumes 1.5 million liters a year, while the taps of the local population run dry.
It is a system that sacrifices tomorrow’s survival in favor of today’s political quietism and foreign exchange — a slow-bleed crisis in which the most vulnerable are the first to pay as aquifer levels fall, deserts advance and soaring bread prices rip up social contracts. Addressing this requires a dismantling of the political economy that privileges water exports over conservation and local nourishment — a task that demands much more courage than simply investing in the next desalination plant.
- Hafed Al-Ghwell is a senior fellow and executive director of the North Africa Initiative at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. X: @HafedAlGhwell