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 73% in Iraq and 79% in Egypt (World Bank series, 2022).¹ 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.

The weight behind that politics is measurable. Agriculture is 42.9% of Syrian GDP (2022, the latest year reported), and 16.6% of Egypt’s, 10.6% of Iran’s and 10.5% of Morocco’s (2025); it employs 31.6% of working Yemenis, 27.9% of Moroccans and 17.5% of Egyptians (ILO modelled estimates, 2025).^2 3 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%.⁴ Every tonne of imported wheat is about 1,800 cubic metres of water someone else supplied, of which some 340 is irrigation water.⁵ That is the virtual water trade, and it is what lets the region feed itself at all.⁶

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, and Egypt is answering with the world’s largest drainage-reuse plants. Groundwater farming in Morocco, and on officials’ figures in Iran, is being converted to drip and other modern irrigation as aquifers fall; in Syria and Yemen conversion has been small. Desert irrigation in the Gulf has seen Saudi wheat and fodder bans, with wheat partly allowed back since 2018.

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. 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 93.⁷

Conveyance is the first efficiency lever. Egypt accelerated canal lining in 2020 on a presidential directive, against a 20,000 km target and a promised seepage saving of 5 billion cubic metres a year.⁸ By July 2024 the minister counted 7,700 km rehabilitated.⁹ 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%.¹⁰ 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.¹¹

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.^12 13

Highland and groundwater farming: efficient farms, emptier aquifers

Morocco is expanding localised irrigation while groundwater overexploitation worsens; Iran reports that 40% of irrigated land is equipped with modern irrigation systems, and available figures for Syria and Yemen are older. 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.¹⁴ On-farm equipment is subsidised at 80 to 100% through the agricultural development fund.¹⁵

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.^14 15 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.¹⁶ 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 2021.²⁰

The subsidy question nobody asks first

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.¹⁵ 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.²¹

Metering was slow and partial. Monitoring under the flagship project included meters installed for 20 farmers in Haouz and eight in Tadla; tenders were restarted several times and farmers were generally reluctant to have wells or boreholes metered.¹⁶ Morocco collected MAD 26 million to MAD 40 million a year in abstraction fees from irrigation users between 2012 and 2017, against potential collections of about MAD 280 million, and collected no DPH fee from small-scale or private irrigation, which represented roughly 19% and more than 45% of irrigated areas respectively.¹⁵

Drought, and what it does to the arithmetic

The production series show it. 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 2023.²⁰

Import dependency rose. Morocco’s cereal import dependency ratio rose from 41.4% in 2013 to 2015 to 74.0% in 2020 to 2022. Tunisia’s was 70.3% in 2013 to 2015, 66.4% in 2017 to 2019, 71.8% in 2020 to 2022 and 87.0% in 2021 to 2023. Iraq’s was 46.3% in 2019 to 2021 and 63.0% in 2021 to 2023.⁴ The World Bank attributes close to 37% of the variance in Moroccan output to rainfall shocks and estimates that reduced water availability and climate-related crop-yield losses could reduce GDP by up to 6.5%.¹⁵ During the drought between 2019 and 2022, irrigation allocation rates were 65% in Gharb, 27% in Tadla, 19% in Haouz and 4% in Doukkala.²¹

One case in this sector, examined in full.

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

Tracked projects whose stated purpose includes agricultural water: irrigation systems and tunnels, agricultural drainage reuse, dams whose register entry or FAO AQUASTAT record lists irrigation, and wastewater plants with stated agricultural reuse. A project that serves cities as well as farms appears here when its entry states an irrigation use.

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

Projects

Private capital reaches farms in three main ways. Irrigation PPPs came first. Morocco’s El Guerdane was the world’s first irrigation concession, and the model has since been used for 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; Morocco and Tunisia subsidise water-saving equipment. Landmark schemes:

• 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, which needs metering to keep abstraction in check
• Fertigation and soil-moisture sensing; satellite evapotranspiration monitoring
• Treated-wastewater reuse under national reuse classes and the ISO 16075 series (parts 1 and 2 revised in 2020, later parts issued or revised through 2025)
• Protected agriculture and hydroponics in the Gulf
• Drainage-water recycling at basin scale, as in Egypt's mega-plants

Crop choice matters too. In the 1996 to 2005 global water-footprint dataset, tomatoes take about 214 cubic metres a tonne, dates 2,277 and olives 3,015; blue water makes up about 55% of dates’ total footprint, while green water makes up 43% of their consumptive footprint, the lowest among major crops.⁵ In 2024 Egypt harvested 6,778 kg of wheat a hectare compared with Morocco’s 1,388.²⁰

The compliance layer for reuse-fed and export agriculture:

Saudi Arabia phased out wheat production over concerns about its aquifers.¹⁷ In Jordan, 31 wastewater treatment plants produced 186 million cubic metres of treated wastewater in 2021, about 90% of it reused in irrigation and industry; treated wastewater accounted for about 25% of water used for irrigation.^26 27

What desalinated water costs without subsidy 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 2024.²⁵ Where water use is not constrained, drip irrigation tends to intensify production through a shift towards higher-value crops that consume more water.¹⁵

Treated wastewater 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.¹⁴

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

• Ministry of AgricultureMinistry · Iraq
• 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:

The sources on this page point to two lessons. The first is that an improved surface-water service can reduce groundwater abstraction: in Tadla, abstraction fell after an on-demand service was introduced, rather than through enforcement.¹⁶ The second concerns charging for water withdrawals: between 2012 and 2017 irrigation-fee collections were MAD 26 to 40 million a year against potential revenue of about MAD 280 million.¹⁵ Imported grain carries water with it: the global average water footprint of wheat was 1,827 cubic metres per tonne in 1996 to 2005.⁵

Standing references for this sector.

• 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 World Bank's archive of research and publications. openknowledge.worldbank.org