Agriculture & Food Security

Agriculture is where the region’s water actually goes. It takes 92% of withdrawals in Iran, 91% in Yemen, 88% in Morocco and Syria, 87% in Türkiye and 82% in Saudi Arabia, and still 74% in Iraq and 79% in Egypt.¹ Much of it grows crops that could be imported for a fraction of the water. Yet farming is also livelihoods, food-security politics and the anchor of rural life, so the question is never simply to use less. It is to grow more value per drop, and that tension makes agricultural water the region’s largest efficiency market.

The weight behind that politics is measurable. Agriculture is 42.9% of Syrian value added, 16.6% of Egypt’s and 10.6% of Morocco’s and Iran’s, and it employs 31.6% of working Yemenis, 27.9% of Moroccans and 17.5% of Egyptians.⁷⁸ No ministry reforms irrigation without reckoning with those shares.

The regional food system leans on world markets to balance its water budget. On the FAO’s cereal import dependency ratio for 2021 to 2023, Jordan, Libya, Qatar and the UAE import essentially all their cereals, Kuwait 99%, Israel 94%, Saudi Arabia 89%, Morocco 65%, Iraq 63%, Egypt 43% and Iran 41%.⁹ Every tonne of imported wheat is about 1,800 cubic metres of water someone else supplied, of which some 340 is irrigation water.¹¹ That is the virtual water trade, and it is what lets the region feed itself at all.¹²

The region’s farming falls into distinct systems. River-basin agriculture on Egypt’s Nile and in Iraq’s Mesopotamia still floods fields through canal networks a pharaoh would recognise, and Egypt is answering with the world’s largest drainage-reuse plants. Highland rain-fed and groundwater farming in Morocco, Syria, Iran and Yemen is being converted to drip as aquifers fall. Desert irrigation in the Gulf is retreating from its most extreme experiments, though less cleanly than the headlines suggest.

Source: World Bank World Development Indicators, series ER.H2O.FWAG.ZS, drawn from FAO AQUASTAT; 2022 values.¹ The share is of withdrawals, not of the resource: a country can take a small share of a large river or a large share of very little.

The three systems, and what each is doing about water

River-basin agriculture: flood irrigation on a fixed allocation

Egypt’s Nile and Iraq’s Mesopotamian plain still flood fields through canal networks that would be recognisable to a pharaoh. Egypt’s treaty share under the 1959 agreement with Sudan is 55.5 billion cubic metres a year, so it cannot answer growth with more water. Its total withdrawal is 77.5 billion cubic metres, the second largest in the region after Iran’s 93.²

Conveyance is the first efficiency lever. Egypt began lining its canals in 2020 against a 20,000 km target and a promised seepage saving of 5 billion cubic metres a year.³ By July 2024 the minister counted 7,700 km rehabilitated.⁴ The saving is contested, because seepage in the Delta also recharges the shallow aquifer. A 2026 model of Gharbia governorate found canal seepage supplies about 20% of that recharge, and lining all its canals cut the seepage by about 96%.⁵ The ministry has said on-farm conversion to modern irrigation is being studied for the same kind of effect. The review covers aquifer recharge and the drainage water that re-enters the system elsewhere.⁶

Its answer is drainage reuse at unmatched scale, and that has a limit its own institutes have published. The National Water Research Centre’s Nile Research Institute and Drainage Research Institute reported in May 2026 that water reaches the Bahr El-Baqar plant at about 2,200 ppm of dissolved solids, already above Egypt’s 2,000 ppm reuse limit; the plant’s published process train is coagulation, flocculation, decantation, filtration and disinfection, with no desalting step.²⁰²²

Highland and groundwater farming: efficient farms, emptier aquifers

Morocco, Syria, Iran and Yemen pump groundwater and are converting to drip as aquifers fall. Morocco had equipped about 794,000 hectares with localised irrigation by the end of 2023, close to half its irrigated area, against 43% in 2020 and 9% in 2008: most of the conversion is recent.¹³ On-farm equipment is subsidised at 80 to 100% through the agricultural development fund.¹⁴

It did not stabilise demand. The Cour des comptes found that the effort had not stabilised irrigation demand and that groundwater overexploitation had worsened; the World Bank names the mechanism as Jevons’ paradox and puts groundwater withdrawals 28% above renewable resources.¹³¹⁴ The instructive exception is Tadla, where groundwater abstraction fell 43%, more than twice the target, with 80% of well-owning farmers cutting back and half stopping pumping altogether. The World Bank attributes that to a reliable on-demand surface supply replacing rotation, and explicitly not to enforcement of abstraction licences, an indicator deleted at restructuring.¹⁵ Reliability, not policing, moved the meter.

Desert irrigation: a retreat, and then a partial return

Saudi Arabia banned domestic wheat production from crop year 2015/16 to stop aquifer mining, then partially rescinded the ban in November 2018. Procurement has run again since 2019/20 under a quota: as renewed in 2024 it admits up to 5,000 small farmers at 50 hectares each, caps output at 1.5 million tonnes a year, and may be moved depending on the aquifer and world supply.¹⁷

The fodder story is the bigger water story. The green-fodder cultivation ban took effect on 5 November 2018, on a phase-out set in December 2015; green fodder had been consuming about 17 billion cubic metres of water a year, of which 9 billion was expected to be saved, with production cut 65% and replaced by imports.¹⁸ Perennial fodder in the sedimentary shelf regions stops from 16 November 2026 under Council of Ministers Resolution No. 66, with a 50-hectare cap per licence.¹⁹ The trace is visible in the statistics: Saudi barley production fell from 438,084 tonnes in 2020 to about 4,000 in 2021.¹⁰

The subsidy question nobody asks first

A capital subsidy claimed by application favours farmers with the money to co-invest and a borehole to irrigate from. In Morocco the World Bank records individual uptake equipping 395,000 hectares, 117% of target, while uptake was slower among the 70,000 small farmers targeted in collective schemes.¹⁴ A separate review of the large-scale modernisation project found it reached 42% of its target for approved requests, 8,670 hectares against 20,700, ranging from 8% in Doukkala to 65% in Tadla.¹⁶

Measurement was never built either. Monitoring under the flagship project amounted to meters installed for 20 farmers in Haouz and eight in Tadla, with tenders restarted several times and farmers reluctant to have their wells metered.¹⁵ And the water itself is barely priced: Morocco collects 26 to 40 million dirhams a year in abstraction fees from irrigation users against a potential 280 million, nothing at all from small-scale or private irrigation, which between them cover most of the irrigated area.¹⁴

Drought, and what it does to the arithmetic

Production series make the case better than any projection. Moroccan cereal output ran 10.45 million tonnes in 2021, 3.51 in 2022, 5.63 in 2023 and 3.21 in 2024, the weakest of the decade and 69% below 2021, with wheat yields falling from 2,634 to 1,388 kg a hectare. Tunisian cereals fell 64% in a single year, from 1.71 million tonnes in 2022 to 612,000 in 2023. Syrian barley collapsed 94% between 2019 and 2022; Iraqi barley fell from 1.76 million tonnes in 2020 to 106,000 in 2023.¹⁰

The import bill moves with it. Morocco’s cereal import dependency ratio went from 41.4% in 2013 to 2015 to 74.0% in 2020 to 2022; Tunisia’s from 66.4% to 87.0%; Iraq’s from 46.3% to 63.0%.⁹ The World Bank puts more than a third of the variance in Moroccan output down to drought, with up to 6.5% of GDP at risk.¹⁴ And drought undoes modernisation: during the 2019 to 2022 drought, irrigation allocation rates were 65% in Gharb, 27% in Tadla, 19% in Haouz and 4% in Doukkala.¹⁶

One scheme in this sector, examined in full: what was built, what it cost, what worked and what did not.

The hub's headline metric for all twenty countries. Hover, tap or focus a country; the ranked table sits alongside.

Tracked projects touching agricultural water: irrigation systems, drainage reuse and farm-supply schemes.

The tracked projects in this sector and the structured procurements coming next, straight from our databases.

Projects

Private capital reaches farms through a few well-worn doors. Irrigation PPPs came first. Morocco’s El Guerdane was the world’s first irrigation concession, and the model has spread to desalination-fed perimeters at Chtouka and Dakhla. Reuse-to-agriculture schemes treat effluent as the feedstock, as in the Jordan Valley and Egypt’s New Delta. And agtech, meaning drip, sensors and fertigation, is sold farm by farm, often subsidised by national efficiency programmes. Landmark schemes:

Sources: IFC’s account of the El Guerdane concession²³; Egypt’s irrigation ministry and ACCIONA on Bahr El-Baqar²¹²²; Le360’s review of the Cour des comptes on Chtouka pricing.²⁴

• Drip and micro-irrigation retrofits: Morocco's PNEEI targeted about 550,000 ha and had equipped 794,400 by the end of 2023
• Solar pumping: the cheapest lift in history, and a governance risk without metering
• Fertigation and soil-moisture sensing; satellite evapotranspiration monitoring
• Treated-wastewater reuse under national reuse classes and ISO 16075, revised in 2020
• Protected agriculture and hydroponics in the Gulf, where the gain is in yield per hectare as much as in water per tonne
• Drainage-water recycling at basin scale, as in Egypt's mega-plants

Crop choice moves more water than any of it. On the standard global water-footprint dataset, tomatoes take about 214 cubic metres a tonne, dates 2,277 and olives 3,015, and dates draw 55% of their footprint from irrigation rather than rain, the lowest green-water share in the study.¹¹ Yields set the other half of the ratio: in 2024 Egypt harvested 6,778 kg of wheat a hectare against Morocco’s 1,388, which is what irrigation reliability is worth.¹⁰

The compliance layer for reuse-fed and export agriculture:

Instruments as published by each jurisdiction or its auditor; national reuse classes differ by crop and treatment level.

The economics are brutal and clarifying. A cubic metre in a Gulf wheat field once returned a few cents; the same metre in drip-fed horticulture returns dollars, and in a city network more still. That gradient, not ideology, is what moves water. Saudi wheat was banned when the opportunity cost became undeniable, and Jordan’s farmers took treated wastewater because the fresh water had migrated to Amman: 31 plants produce 186 million cubic metres with about 90% reused, and reclaimed water is about a quarter of the country’s irrigation supply.²⁵²⁶

What an unsubsidised irrigation tariff looks like is now visible in Morocco. Desalinated water costs between 4.48 and 23.55 dirhams a cubic metre before subsidy; at Laâyoune production cost 23.41 dirhams in 2023 against a tariff of no more than 5.06; Agadir absorbed 684 million dirhams of compensation between January 2022 and June 2024.²⁴ Efficiency programmes pay back fastest where tariffs or quotas make saved water valuable. Where irrigation is effectively free, drip kit mostly expands the irrigated area.

Reuse is the cheapest new water for farming, and it is not yet reaching farms everywhere it is produced. Moroccan reuse reached about 37 million cubic metres in 2023 against a target of 100 million a year by 2027, confined to industry and green space, with agricultural use still negligible for want of cost-sharing rules and quality standards.¹³

The bodies that commission, regulate or deliver in this sector, and the names that recur across its tenders.

• Ministry of AgricultureMinistry · Libya
• Ministry of Agriculture & Land ReclamationMinistry · Egypt
• Regional Agricultural Development Offices (ORMVA)Irrigation & drainage · Morocco
• Egyptian Public Authority for Drainage Projects (EPADP)Irrigation & drainage · Egypt
• Jordan Valley Authority (JVA)Irrigation & drainage · Jordan

Mandates, procurement routes and the rest of the region’s institutions are in the decision-maker directory.

Where the near-term money is:

Expect the share of water going to agriculture to fall slowly while the value produced per drop rises fast. Scarcity sets the direction. Reuse becomes the default irrigation source near cities, groundwater gets metered, and food-security strategy keeps shifting from growing calories to buying them, with high-value horticulture as the export counterweight.

Two things would change the trajectory faster than any technology. The first is buying reliability rather than equipment: the one measured case of falling abstraction in Morocco came from an on-demand surface service, not from enforcement.¹⁵ The second is charging something for groundwater, because a fee collected at 9 to 14% of what is owed is not a price signal.¹⁴ Until then, the region will keep importing its water balance: about 1,800 cubic metres with every tonne of wheat.¹¹

Standing references for this sector. Every one is a real work and every link was checked.

• FAO AQUASTAT, the standing database of national water resources, withdrawals and irrigated area. The denominator behind most figures on this site. fao.org
• International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage, the technical body for irrigation modernisation and drainage practice. icid.org
• World Bank open knowledge repository, the source for the irrigation project completion reports that record what drip subsidies actually achieved. openknowledge.worldbank.org