Search

The history of modern Iraq has been marked by violence, oppression, and foreign interventions to a degree that stands out even among other war-torn countries. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, many retrospectives were still dominated by a US-centric navel gazing of the chattering classes inside the beltway, but more Iraqi voices and alternative viewpoints were present in op-eds and articles than a decade earlier. In this spirit this roundtable section reflects on recent Iraqi history and contemporary developments with an eye toward memory politics in the context of transforming governance mechanisms and evolving civil society actors. It builds on a conference held at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg in March 2023 and portrays emerging avenues for research as well as new perspectives on long running debates.

Iraq’s food security has been profoundly affected by its oil-based economy, over three decades of conflict and its politics that have been shaped by authoritarian rentierism. The article outlines the political economy of food security in Iraq and how it has been shaped historically. It identifies various conditioning factors such as oil, conflict, environment, agricultural development strategies and institutional setups, such as the Public Distribution System (PDS), the world’s largest public food program. It then disentangles these factors in an analysis of data from Gallup, Iraq Body Count and various international organizations to give an appreciation of the Iraqi food security situation since the end of the Saddam regime. Finally, it takes a look at views of Iraqi experts on current food security issues in Iraq, using the results of an online survey that was conducted from May–October 2015 among 152 Iraqi experts from academia, ministries and NGOs. Iraqis overwhelmingly identify political instability and bad governance as major challenges to food security; it is unlikely that mere technocratic policy prescriptions can improve food security in the absence of political stability and improved governance.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is the world’s largest importer of food, especially of cereals, sugar and poultry. Tropical regions have gained growing importance as suppliers of such commodities in recent decades. Latin America and Africa in particular have been identified as sources of future agricultural growth that could provide exportable surpluses to the MENA and other food import dependent regions, such as East Asia. Foreign investors, host governments, local communities and international organizations are crucial actors in these agricultural expansion processes, which do, however, entail ecological and socio-economic risks. The article provides a historical perspective of tropical agriculture and the MENA in various food regimes since the 19th century. It then outlines the importance of tropical agriculture and the MENA in global food trade flows and analyzes to what extent the MENA relies on countries with tropical agriculture in its food trade. Finally, it takes a look at agricultural investment flows from the MENA to the tropics. Associated political and socio-economic issues are analyzed, reasons for a marked implementation gap are identified and finally how such investments might relate to MENA food security strategies is discussed.