1. Introduction

The purpose of the chapter is to highlight the importance of food supply chains in understanding Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) water security. Food supply chains are the metabolism of global food trade. In hyper-arid regions such as the GCC, food supply chains provide societies with imported food to keep the economies food-secure. However, food supply chains do not only trade food from one point of the world to another but also carry water. 90 per cent of the water needed by an individual or a national economy is embedded in their food consumption. This water will be called food-water in this analysis. Food requires transpired water to produce it and water is the main limiting factor in the GCC region to increase food production. The GCC economies are thus among the leading food importing economies in the world. Their reliance on food supply chains is therefore evident.

The aims of this chapter are twofold. It will first introduce the food supply chain framework to the reader to lift the topic of water resource management from a mere issue of national strategy into the arena of international trade. The authors of this chapter view farmers and thus the private sector as pivotal to global and regional food and water security and to installing measures to steward water ecosystem services. Given the increasingly globalised political economy of agriculture, the food supply chain framework will enable the reader to grasp the changing nature of water resources management and the urgent need for GCC economies to carefully manage food-water imported through supply chains. Secondly, the chapter analyses the options of GCC initiatives to invest in food supply chains to increase food supply through improved food-water management. The two case studies of investment opportunities and activities in Sudan and Romania are used to analyse the environmental risks and opportunities of wheat production. Wheat will be the crop of concern due to its social importance in Middle Eastern diets across the different social groups.

2. The Underlying Fundamentals of Food Supply Chains:

Actors and Consequences

The first section introduces the importance of food supply chains in understanding water security. It will highlight both the politicised relationships, as well as the inescapable bond, between sustainable food security and sustainable water security. This connection is important for public and private sector agents to recognise in order to improve water resources management hidden in supply chains.