 SWEblyn, mwyaf yn ym Mhwyl Wabilyd. Felly sefydliwch y dirat cheiwng gweithio. Rydyn ni'n rhaid i gael gyda'r ffordd i chi'n ddim yn eich gweld yn y dwybod yn y gwaith. Mi'n ffordd i chi'n cael ei gweithio'n gweithio i'n ddim hon, a'i gyda Professor Jane Harrogman yw amser yn ei gyllid cymrydau. Ar dweud y cymdeilidol cymddiant, oed yn hyrw ven nesaf i gan y ond jain, ac masgrwyd a'r systy費. I know that for two of them it's the first time they've heard her give an academic lecture, so I think it would be good fun for them to see Jane in a rather different sort of atmosphere. We really appreciate you taking the trouble to be here. It all adds to the occasion that is a so-ass inaugural. It's a ceremony. It's a reed to passage for the speaker. It's a celebration of Jane's achievements and it's an enjoyable intellectual event for the whole so-ass community. And to make sure it's an enjoyable event, I do need to do a bit of simple housekeeping to begin with, so do please turn off your mobile phones. This is something I always forget, so actually saying it myself is a good thing to do. So, okay, and do bear in mind where the fire exits are. We're not expecting a fire this evening. If you hear an alarm, you should leave the building. I'm very pleased to preside over this inaugural lecture. It's the first of a set of four fascinating inaugural lectures which will take place over the next month. I think it's going to be really interesting. I've known Jane principally as head of department. We had many interactions when she was head of the department of economics rather than academic. So whilst I know she's incredibly clear thinking, very capable indeed and superb head of department, I actually don't know a great deal about her academic project. So, me for one, I'm really looking forward to hearing about the academic question she's looked at and particularly about being enlightened as to whether food prices did plant the seeds of the Arab Spring. Professor Harrigan will be introduced by Professor Fred Nixon. Professor Nixon was professor of developmental economics, development economics in the economics department of Manchester University for many years and indeed was there when Jane joined the department, I guess about 20 years ago. He's co-author as many of the people here will know of one of the most popular texts on development economics and has written extensively on industrialisation in developing and transitional countries. He's also published books with Jane and his most recent book published last year co-author with Michael Tribe and Andy Sumner's Economics and Development Studies. He's also worked as a consultant for numerous international institutions. At the end after Jane has spoken, the vote of thanks will be given by Professor Hamid Elsaid of Manchester Metropolitan University. Now, Professor Elsaid is a SOAS alumnus. So welcome back, did an MA in near Middle Eastern Studies and he's published widely on the economic and political issues in the Middle East and North Africa. And when I was looking at his CV, he's published books, book chapters and journal articles with Jane and you will have seen outside the advert for the three books that he's published with Jane which is really must be quite extraordinary and looking at the titles of those books and he has also a forthcoming book on beyond belief, counter radicalism and de-radicalisation programmes. It seems to me that really you should be coming back to SOAS. We're very grateful to them both for being here this evening, for being part of this evening's event and to introduce Professor Harrigan on our pass-over to Professor Nix. Well, good evening ladies and gentlemen. It's a great pleasure and indeed a privilege to be invited to make these introductory comments on Jane. She has a very long and distinguished CV which I'm not going to try and summarise. I will pick out a number of points that I think are of perhaps more interest to us and which I now realise will lead into her presentation itself. I should refer however to Jane's long and distinguished academic background. She's a graduate both of Oxford and Cambridge. She's a visitor from Harvard and somehow got her PhD in Manchester. I'm not quite certain how Manchester slips in with that group but I'm very glad she did do that. I've known Jane since at least 1991. I can't remember the exact first time we met but certainly it would have been 1991 when she joined the Department of Economics at the University of Manchester which, as some of you may know, had a very strong tradition in development economics. We'd had a diploma in economic development since 1961 and if we'd been more entrepreneurial in our activities I think we would have maintained that position. When I was making these points I felt like somebody out of a Monty Python sketch of many years ago. I kept counting up the number of points I was going to make and then deciding I wanted to make more but I think I've got the number down to five so I'll try and keep it at five points I want to emphasise and if I go beyond that I hope you'll understand. The first point I want to make with respect to Jane is that she was an ODI, an overseas development institute fellow in Malawi in 1985-87. I think the ODI fellowships have always been extremely important because they give young economists and others very important experience of real world development work. I think there's no substitute for working in a developing country and it was once I think considered essential if one wanted to be an academic development economist one really had to demonstrate one had some first hand experience in a developing country. I think that's probably gone today now it seems to have disappeared this need for first hand experience. I think today too many development economists can sit down with access to large databases with suitable computing power and appropriate software and churn out articles which although they may be submitted for the research assessment exercise probably don't help us understand much about the development process itself and I think Jane's work in Malawi is extremely important in that respect it resulted in a book from dictatorship to democracy Economic Policy in Malawi 1964-2000 and this is also a point to refer to the importance of history in development thinking. Again I think the fashion is now to divorce history from economics and I think it's very important that we keep the sense of history in our thinking about development issues so that I think I'd be my first point. The need for specific country experience the need for an historical context within which one locates one's work as an economist and one doesn't simply sit at a desk in the middle of a big city churning out regression results which often mean nothing. My second point is that not only does Jane have experience of specific country not only experience of the development process itself but of specific country expertise. Cross country regressions are really no substitute in my opinion for detailed country specific case study work but unfortunately that is no longer very fashionable very difficult to get a publisher these days or at least five years ago when I last tried to accept single country case study material. Publishers seem not to like single country case studies although Jane's work on the Middle Eastern and North African economies illustrates that research funding is available for regional groups or country group studies as long as they meet the currently fashionable criteria for the RAE and can nowadays demonstrate research impact whatever that may mean in the social sciences I'd like to hear someone tell me. And I would go as far I think as to say in my opinion the best work over the past 10 to 15 years has been nearly all based on country case studies I think there's no question at the work of people like Robert Wade from the LSE Alice Amsdon from MIT in North America Ha Joon Chang from Cambridge have produced case study work country specific material that helps us to understand more about development issues and the development process than again my Bette Noir the cross country regression analysis. The third point I'd like to make with respect to Jane's background is that she joined the Department of Economics having already made her name in collaboration with two eminent economists, John Toy and Paul Mosley in her work on the impact of aid volume entitled Aid and Power published in 1991. This also added to her country specific experience I think I'm right in saying she did the case studies on Jamaica and Guyana and later added Ghana to her list of country expertise and the important point about Aid and Power I think is that it attempts to develop the counterfactual in other words what would have happened if counterfactuals and their construction have a long history in development economics especially if we're looking at the impact for example of World Bank structural adjustment programmes or IMF stabilisation programmes but I think Aid and Power was probably one of the first attempts to generalise and popularise this attempt at constructing a counterfactual and again I think we learn a great deal from trying to construct a counterfactual in this respect and importantly and this leads me on to another point that Jane took a heterodox approach to these issues it wasn't a straightforward conventional orthodox mainstream approach to the issue of the impact of aid and the impact of policy packages falling under the heading of structural adjustment Jane's work I think has always been characterised by what is now commonly called a heterodox approach and I think that's an important point too the fourth point I'd like to emphasise because those of you that have worked in economics will know that there has been a major ideological battle fought between so-called mainstream and so-called heterodox economists so with the past 15 or so years prompted in part by the research assessment exercise but prompted by the increasing importance I think of North American theory North American practice which has increasingly entered into UK economics departments with I would argue largely detrimental effects when Jane joined the Department of Economics in Manchester in 1991 we were still a very diverse department with very strong intellectual traditions and teaching and research traditions in a number of areas I could mention agricultural economics development economics industrial economics marxist economics the history of economic thought as there is in 1993 a school of economic studies was formed in Manchester and this signalled a major shift of resources into the so-called mainstream and this in turn led to the increasing marginalisation of non-mainstream sub-disciplines and this has now led in Manchester's case for example and Manchester is not alone in this respect in the UK and indeed there are similar developments in North American universities agricultural economics has disappeared development economics has virtually disappeared industrial economics has virtually disappeared and one doesn't dare mention marxist economics of course or the history of economic thought so there have been major changes in departments development economics was very important in Manchester both because of its intellectual history and traditions in Manchester but also because it attracted students and it brought in revenue so it was difficult to deal with by the mainstream but it was an unwinnable battle which we have lost now and I would like to acknowledge Jane's role in fighting that battle while she was in Manchester and her attempts to maintain the diversity of theoretical approaches characteristic of development economics at least as taught in the United Kingdom I should think and the policy focus of much of the work of development economists policy has always been an important part of the work of development economists and I think so as his gain was Manchester's loss in this respect a very real loss when Jane left Manchester and moved to so as and I think so as has a big responsibility here of trying to maintain a heterodox tradition within the development economics sub-discipline and my final point is really that that is my fifth and final point so as is almost alone within the UK not quite alone but almost alone in maintaining a heterodox tradition in both teaching and research there are individuals that have often left economics departments have gone into business schools and specialised institutes that still elsewhere in LSE, Cambridge, Glasgow for example still maintain the heterodox perspective but economics departments are being weeded out of these people so my best wishes for so as in the future to maintain this reputation and this work and then finally this is my final point I think it's my fifth point I've not commented on Jane's more recent work on the Middle Eastern and North African economies for which three books are on sale outside in case you didn't notice but I would like to link this as my final point to what I see is the way the media is treating the current upheavals in the Middle Eastern economies it would be good to see heterodox economists contributing more to an understanding of the events in this region I made this point before I knew the title of Jane's lecture so it fits in perfectly with what in part what she's going to say but I didn't know this at the time I would like to see sensible economists by which I mean heterodox economists being able to contribute more fully to an understanding of events in the region and at the very least question the use of the language of development as it is being used, not only in Libya but in Afghanistan to justify what I believe is now called liberal imperialism though I'm not quite certain what's liberal about it it's certainly imperialism in my opinion that is the military intervention in these countries I think economists do have an important role to flesh out our understanding of what is happening in these countries, why it's happening and what could possibly be done about it it's not just a political issue economists should have a role in the public debate on these matters and I'm extremely pleased that I can now hand over to Jane and she will pick up on this point thank you very much thank you very much Fred or Professor Nixon for that introduction before I start speaking I'm first going to take this silly hat off otherwise it's going to fall off and I hope you'll just indulge me for a couple of minutes because I have a few thanks I'd like to say firstly thank you very much to both Professor Nixon who gave the introduction and Professor Elside who's going to give the vote of thanks they've both come down from Manchester today Fred was very influential in my early career and was an excellent mentor for me when I was a young academic at the University of Manchester so I think he's had a profound influence on my career more recently, Hamid has also had a very profound influence on my career because it was Hamid who persuaded me to move away from just specialising on Sub-Saharan Africa and to start doing some work on the Middle East and North Africa and I think it's fair to say we've had a very good and productive working relationship so I'd like to thank Hamid for that as well secondly I'd like to thank all my colleagues at SOAS SOAS is a truly fantastic place to work Fred's outlined some of the problems we faced as development economists in Manchester it's been a liberating experience coming to SOAS and I'd like to thank my colleagues thirdly I'd like to thank my family and friends some of whom are here and I thank you very very much for coming and listening to me particularly my sister and my mother who've come all the way from Devon and the Isle of Wight and last but not least I'd like to thank my partner Jill of 22 years who I think it's fair to say without her I wouldn't be standing here today so thank you to all of those people right let's move on to the business of the lecture I'll just give you a very quick road map of what I plan to do in the 45 minutes or so I've got I firstly want to look at the food security status of the Middle Eastern North Africa which I'm just going to refer to the MENA region here's a little map showing the main countries that are going to be covered in my talk so I want to look at food security in this region and some of the policy options then I want to look at the role that food issues particularly the price of food have actually played in the current uprisings or the Arab Spring as it's being referred to in the media and then finally if we've got time what I'd like to look at is the way in which food price issues and food security issues particularly their political dimensions have led policy makers very recently in the Middle East to adopt quite innovative and interesting and new food security policies which are actually quite controversial so those are the three things I'd like to cover I'll start off very quickly with a standard definition of food security which is taken from the World Food Summit in Rome in 1995 food security exists when all people at all times have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life now you may think this is just about the supply of food but Amartya Sen in his famous work on famines coined the term entitlements to food by which he pointed out that it's not just the supply of food it's also individuals entitlements to food which is determined by their income and their assets and also the price of food so perhaps a definition that pulls together these diverse aspects of food security is what's sometimes been called the three A's of food security availability of food, accessibility of food and affordability of food and it's this latter point the affordability of food which is particularly pertinent to what we've been seeing happening in the Middle Eastern North Africa in recent months as Fred mentioned the media has portrayed much of what's been happening as a purely political uprising demonstrations against political regimes that people are no longer happy with but what I want to argue is that there are actually some quite strong socio-economic factors that have driven people to rebel and revolt against incumbent regimes now in terms of food security there are basically three roots that a nation can take to achieve food security for its population enough food to feed the population via domestic production sometimes known as self sufficiency via international trade importing food sometimes known as a trade based strategy or through food aid which is another form of imports so three basic strategies and I'll look at these in the context of MENA as I go through the lecture but let's first look at the food security status of the MENA region as a whole with a few stylised facts one measure of a country or a region's food security is often taken to be the food gap or the food deficit which is the difference between the country's food requirements and its domestic production and that food gap between requirements and domestic production has to be met through imports commercially or through food aid now using that concept of a determinant of food security the MENA region is actually the most food insecure region in the world in that it has the largest food deficit of any region in the world and therefore it relies very very heavily on imports to meet its food requirements if you look at most of the Arab countries in the MENA region they import at least 50% of the food calories they consume and of the food calories they consume about 35% comes from wheat alone and wheat products such as bread much of which or almost all of which are imported and as a result of that the MENA region is the largest net importer of cereal in the world as the map shows there if you take data for 2007 the net import of cereal into MENA was 58 million metric tonnes that's more than sub-Saharan Africa which had an import of 27 million metric tonnes and even more than Asia which is much much much more densely populated that imported 47 million metric tonnes so MENA is the world's largest importer of cereals in the world in terms of metric tonnes now this massive reliance on imports has been building up over the last 40 years or so and several factors explain it one is incredibly rapid population growth in MENA since the 1960s countries like the United Arab Emirates for example in the last 40 years have seen their population growth by 3,000% and if you look at many of the Middle Eastern North African countries they are in the top 20 or 30 countries for population growth rates over the last 30 years so strong population growth also very very rapid income growth after the oil boom period of the 1970s starting in 1973 as well as extensive urbanisation these factors have led to a huge increase in the demand for food whilst at the same time on the supply side MENA's production of its own food has not kept pace this is partly because agricultural productivity in the region is quite low for obvious reasons ecological and climate reasons there's limited supplies of both water and arable land since much of the region is arid or semi arid so historically there's been a growing food gap in the MENA region with increased reliance on food imports and in fact the food and agriculture organisation of the UN predicts that the food gap for the MENA region is actually going to get worse over the next 20 years and that dependence on food imports will increase by over 60% in the next 20 years the country that's predicted to have the greatest increase in its food import demands over the next 20 years interestingly is Egypt now the fact that MENA relies so heavily on imports for much of their food requirements means they're highly dependent on global food markets and this means that the region is very vulnerable both to price shocks in international food markets and also to supply shocks or disruptions in global supply and I've given you here a graph from the United Nations World Food Price Index the red line shows the year on year change in the food price index running from 1990 through to 2010 and the thing that strikes you about that red line is its incredible volatility there is a lot of volatility in food market prices in the global market the reason for this is that international food markets are what we call very thin in the sense that very little of the food that's actually produced in the world is actually traded in international markets it's mainly consumed domestically so very little of the world's total food supplies are actually sold on international markets in addition demand and supply for food is what economists call very inelastic which means that very small shocks such as shocks to supply in the form of a drought get amplified into quite large price changes in international markets leading to this volatility so the first problem that men are facing it's heavily reliant on international food markets for its food security and yet the prices it faces in those markets are incredibly volatile the second problem that men are facing is in terms of supply if you look at international food markets 73% of all the food traded internationally comes from just five principle countries or regions the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina and the European Union between the five of them account for nearly three quarters of all of the world's traded cereals so men has access to food is very vulnerable to events in these five particular countries such as, for example, last year's floods in Australia it also means that men has food supply is very contingent upon countries' relationships with these Western suppliers particularly the United States and there are countries in men like Iran or Syria who don't have particularly good relations with Western powers particularly the United States who fear trade embargoes on food so there's a very clear geopolitical dimension to this heavy reliance on international food markets which means that food security is not just an economic issue it's very much a political issue now moving on to look at food security in the men a region there's obviously quite considerable variation between different countries in men in terms of how food secure they are and IFPRI, the International Food Policy Research Institute in 2010 produced a taxonomy of countries in the Middle Eastern North Africa according to how food secure they were and they base it on four or five different measurements that they put together to form a composite index I won't go into exactly how they constructed their index to measure food security but as you can see there food secure countries are fairly few and far between in the men a region and they predominantly consist of the Gulf countries the GCC countries, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi etc who although are very highly dependent on food imports because of their massive wealth accrued from oil can afford to import the other country there is Iran not in the same wealth league as the GCC countries but having more arable land per capita and therefore relying less on food imports making it more food secure but as you can see even mineral rich countries like Algeria, Iraq, Libya are classified as food security challenged and in fact the two countries that people generally acknowledge as being the most food insecure countries in the region are Jordan and the West Bank and Gaza Strip now if we just quickly go back to our previous slide you will see that massive spike in food prices in 2007, 2008 there was a huge spike or increase in food prices in international markets in 2007, 2008 and although food prices fell back in 2009 they have again increased in the last quarter of 2010 and the first quarter of 2011 this graph doesn't go up to 2011 but I have one in a minute where you will see we now have record highs even above the prices of 2007, 2008 we're seeing a record high in global food prices now most analysts agree that these high food prices are here to stay they're not just a temporary phenomena there are certain structural underlying factors in the global economy which mean food prices are likely to remain high things like population and income growth in emerging countries like China and India changing food consumption patterns towards meat and dairy products increased demand for biofuels as oil prices go up limited global stocks now amongst the OECD countries climate change causing natural disaster we've had floods in Australia and Pakistan we've had droughts in Russia the Ukraine and Argentina high oil prices which are major inputs to food production in the form of fertiliser and transport costs another recent phenomena is the massive growth in speculative trading in food commodities in finance markets whereby agricultural commodities including foods are seen as an asset that speculators are trying to invest in and then finally more and more countries in times of shortage are actually beginning to place embargoes or export restrictions on their exports of food so in 2007, 2008 India restricted rice exports wheat exports and grain exports were banned by Russia, Argentina, Ukraine and Kazakhstan so it seems for various structural reasons that high prices of food in the global food markets are here to stay now because MENA relies so heavily on imports of food to meet its food security these increases in food prices international food prices have had a major negative impact on the MENA region in particular many people in Arab countries have faced a very sharp increase in the price of food products which has severely affected people's living standards has increased poverty and made it increasingly difficult for many people basically to feed their family just to give you some idea of this in 2007, 2008 inflation in the MENA region was running at twice the global average and much of that was triggered by the role of food prices in the price index so high rates of inflation driven by high food prices rising food prices in the last three or four years have also contributed to increased poverty in MENA particularly rural poverty approximately one quarter of the MENA population is classified by the World Bank as being poor and the poor in the MENA region send a staggering 35% to 65% of their incomes on food alone so the poor have been very, very adversely affected by these rising food prices you might say, well how does that square with the fact that many of the people demonstrating in Tahrir Square and other places across the region in the last three or four months are not the poor they're the middle classes, they're intellectuals they're students, they're professionals well in fact sorry I need to go to if you look at what the middle classes in this region spend on food it's quite staggering the middle class in Egypt I've given you a breakdown there of their spending patterns over 40% of their take home income this is the middle class in Egypt is spent on food so a massive increase in food prices has a very severe impact on their living standards gone on here what's it doing? okay sorry about that looking at other countries in the region if you look at the United States average person in the United States only spends 6.9% of their income on food if you look at countries like Egypt Morocco Jordan Algeria the average expenditure in these countries on food is 30% to 40% as a country average so you can see the food prices have not just impacted on the poor they've had a very major impact on the living standards also of the middle classes in these countries and in fact work by the food and agriculture organization has estimated that the food price shock of 2007-2008 led to an additional 4 million undernourished people in the Arab region and it's quite clear that this has contributed to current political instability in the region there were food demonstrations and riots back in 2007-2008 in countries like Bahrain Jordan Lebanon Morocco Saudi Egypt and Yemen this is two or three years before the current uprisings so and I don't think it's any coincidence that it's in the same countries that we're now seeing the Arab Spring materialize now following some of these earlier demonstrations in 0708 governments tried to do something to cushion the impact of rising prices so governments in Egypt Jordan and Syria for example increased public sector wages they increased the subsidy on bread they increased direct cash transfers to many of the poor but these measures were ffiscally very expensive and they didn't go far enough to completely cushion the total impact now as I say the western media is quite interesting in the last few months have predominantly portrayed the Arab Spring as driven by political factors dissatisfaction with autocratic, repressive and undemocratic regimes but what I want to argue is that there were very very important socio-economic dimensions to what we're seeing happening now autocratic regimes in the Middle Eastern North Africa have been tolerated for decades partly because of what's sometimes known as the implicit social contract of the past autocratic regimes provided their populations with social welfare heavy subsidies on food on fuel, on housing on utilities secured jobs in a bloated public sector with lots of perks and in return for this social welfare they garnered loyalty from the population now in the past decade and a half this implicit social contract has been unraveling in menna partly because of the liberalisation programs that the IMF and the World Bank have been implementing in many of these countries such as Jordan Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and just to give a plug for our books that's one of the things we look at in the books that are on sale the way in which economic liberalisation driven by the IMF and the World Bank has had very serious social and social welfare sorts of implications and I would argue that coming on the back of this decade and a half of unraveling of the social contract the food price rises which started in 2007 really were the final nail in the coffin of many of these regimes in other words the political uprisings we are now witnessing are partly because the populations in countries like Egypt Syria, Jordan and Yemen are fed up with repressive regimes but they're fed up with these repressive regimes because the regimes are failing to combat price rises they're failing to combat poverty unemployment and also growing income inequalities that are emerging in countries like Egypt at the moment and I think this helps to answer the question why now, why the Arab Spring now Mubarak was in power for 30 years they've been long standing family dynasties in Jordan in Syria for decades but no Arab Spring and I would say what's triggered the Arab Spring is some of these underlying economic pressures that people now are increasingly facing now one of the reasons why the Arab Spring in 2011 here's another FAO food price index you will see the two spikes the one for 2007-2008 but at the very edge of the diagram you see the price spike for 2010 and the first quarter of 2011 a massive increase in the price of food and what we've seen in many of these countries in the MENA region in the last three or four months is very steep price rises for basic food stuffs things like rice cereals cooking oil sugar etc just taking Egypt as an example in the first quarter of 2011 food price inflation in Egypt was running at 20% which was the highest rate in the world so food price rises have also played a major role in the Tunisian and the Jordanian demonstrations for example in January before Ben Ali fled Tunisia there had been riots against food price rises and Ben Ali promised to reduce the price of staples such as sugar milk and bread but it was too late to save his regime on the very same day that Ben Ali fled from Tunisia there were protests across Jordan at rising food prices in what was called the day of rage where people demonstrated with banners that had bread attached to them and in response King Abdullah slashed food prices and set aside 140 million pounds in the 2011 budget to subsidise food there have also been recent riots concerning food prices in Algeria now I don't want to suggest that the price of food is the only factor contributing towards the Arab Spring the people who have been demonstrating have been a kaleidoscope of people coming together for a variety of reasons but certainly I think what's been happening with food prices has been a very very important trigger and in fact there's some interesting research that's recently come out of the University of Adelaide that's confirmed the link between food prices and political instability they examined the effect of food prices on civil conflict in 120 countries over 40 years found that there was a very very strong link particularly in low income and lower middle income countries between rising food prices and a significant rise in the incidents of anti government demonstrations, riots and civil conflict so I think there's a lot of evidence to say that the Arab Spring has important economic underpinnings now what I'd like to do in the last part of the lecture is to argue that because of this policy makers in the region are now radically rethinking their approach to food security in the past the key policy choice facing the men of countries was how much do we try and produce for ourselves and how much do we rely on food imports and the orthodoxy particularly from international organizations like the World Bank, the IMF the UN was that men should predominantly rely on food imports one of the reasons for this orthodoxy was that men are faces a severe shortage of water so the logic of relying more on imports was the argument that domestic food production in the region is really not an economically efficient use of scarce resources particularly water if you look at renewable water per capita in men are only 17% of the world average if you look at agriculture in the men a region it uses over 80% of the region's water compared to industry that only uses 4% and yet agriculture using 80% of this incredibly scarce resource only contributes 12% to the region's GDP so the conventional wisdom perhaps summed up very well by Richardson Waterbury in their very famous book on the political economy of the men a region they put it quite succinctly the orthodoxy they said men are needs to export in order to eat in other words you have a trade based strategy where you use revenues from your exports to import food now the recent events in men are both the demonstrations partly triggered by rising food prices and also the geopolitical aspect of food security whereby men a countries are incredibly reliant on a very small number of western economies to provide them with their food needs means that policy makers now are starting to rethink their food security strategies they're not willing to allow their countries and their populations to be highly vulnerable to volatile international markets in fact there's concern in some of the men a countries that in the future food prices in the international market may simply become so high that it becomes almost unaffordable without heavy subsidies to feed the population so governments, policy makers in the region are unwilling now to rely so heavily on imported food geopolitical international reasons but also because of domestic political factors in other words the role that rising food prices has played in the current political instability and a strong concept that's beginning to emerge in the region now is the idea of food sovereignty rather than food security and what people mean by this is that a nation state should have full political and economic control over their access to food so how are the men of governments going to do this if they're not going to rely so heavily on imports what's the alternative strategy well I've already argued that the strategy of relying on food production in the region is not an efficient use of resource and will be even less so in the future here I've given you a graph of per capita water availability in the MENA region looking at the first large column for 1960 looking at it decline to 1999 and by 2025 renewable water per capita in MENA is going to be below the critical scarcity level so it's very difficult to see how MENA can substantially increase its own domestic food production so interestingly the alternative that's now being pursued in the region is actually to acquire land in third party countries that are land abundant, labour abundant and water abundant so MENA governments particularly Arab governments are now beginning to invest very heavily either in buying land or leasing land in land and water abundant countries so they can directly source their food without having to rely on imports from the international market and in fact between 2006 and 2010 globally roughly 15 to 20 million hectares of farmland in developing countries has been subject to transactions involving foreign investors many of these investors have been businesses corporations and governments from the MENA region and in fact that's equivalent to about 50% of all the farmland in the European Union so it's an incredibly large land acquisition the slide shows the area of acquisition you'll see there's a particular concentration in sub-Saharan Africa now some people argue that this is the third great wave of economic outsourcing we saw the outsourcing of manufacturing in the 1980s as part of the globalisation process we saw the outsourcing of information technology in the 1990s and people are now saying in the 2000s we're seeing the outsourcing of food production now the advocates of this strategy claim that it's a win-win situation the investing MENA country gets access to food without having to rely on international markets and gets quite a high financial return on its investment the host country or the recipient country selling its land gets an injection of capital into its agricultural sector promoting development and increasing agricultural output and also foreign investors often provide new seeds new marketing things like rural clinics, roads and schools so it's often projected as win-win and two of the countries in the MENA region that are leading this practice are the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia it's not just the MENA region China and South Korea are also doing the land acquisition on a massive scale China by far the largest having acquired over 2.8 million hectares but the Gulf countries and the MENA region are also investing heavily overseas in terms of MENA governments there are agreements in place or negotiations under way Egypt for example is buying land in Uganda and Sudan Bahrain is buying land in the Philippines Kuwait in Cambodia and Laos Libya in Ukraine and Zimbabwe Qatar in Cambodia Vietnam and Kenya so this is a major new face of food security in the MENA region land acquisition and some countries are actively courting the Arab investors Pakistan for example is very very actively courting Arab governments to buy up portions of land in Pakistan in return for oil and finance Sudan as well the largest country in Africa with abundant water from the blue and the white Nile is also a big potential target for land investors but this land acquisition in third party countries to source food for the Arab population which is the changing face of food security in the region is actually highly controversial for several reasons firstly the transactions are not at all transparent and they often favour the investing country with things like tax exemptions in the host country secondly there is considerable potential for labour abuse for the farmers in the host country producing the food for the investor thirdly it can threaten the food security in the host country for example if the host country has a poor harvest the Arab and MENA investing countries that own land will have priority calls on the country's food is interesting for example that right now Saudi Arabia has recently taken shipments of rice, wheat and barley from land that they own in Ethiopia whilst at the world time the world food program spent over 100 million US dollars in food aid providing 230,000 metric tonnes of aid over the last four years to 4.6 million Ethiopians who were threatened by hunger and malnutrition the Sudanese government has recently put out a statement that it plans to set aside a fifth of all its cultivatable land for Arab investors is the world's biggest receiver of food aid another problem is that local populations often lose access to land farmers in Kenya for example and in Pakistan have opposed many of the deals that the Gulf countries are negotiating with their governments because they're losing access to land that they say they have traditionally farmed another potential problem is that the investor may not care about the long term environmental consequences of the countries in which they're investing another problem is that host countries often have weak institutions which makes it very difficult to protect the rights both of the local population and also the environment and then more controversially is this a new form of imperialism or colonialism the head of the FAO Jacques Dioff recently referred to some of these projects as neo-colonialist colonialist so certainly there is a new face of food security in the Mena region and I think a lot of new research needs to be done on these type of land acquisition deals to see exactly how the benefits are stacked up between the investing country and the host country so hopefully what I've done in this lecture is to demonstrate that the issue of food security in the Mena region really is as much a political issue as it is an economic issue and that in the past very heavy reliance on global food markets to meet the region's food needs has contributed to the current wave of unrest that we're now seeing and it's now referred to as the Arab Spring and as a result both of these domestic political considerations the desire to insulate populations from high food prices as well as international geopolitical considerations the unwinniness to be so reliant on a few large western economies for your imports of food many people in the Mena region are totally re-appraising the region's food security status they're criticising very heavily the orthodoxy of organisations like the FAO and the World Bank and they have a new food security strategy of course imports will remain important domestic production will still play a role but increasingly acquiring land in third party countries is the new face of food security in the region and it is controversial and it's not dissimilar to some of the controversies that are currently being debated in terms of China's role in Africa more generally acquiring natural resources in Africa in transactions which are often not particularly transparent so I'd like to thank you for your attention and after all this talk about food after Hamid's given the vote of thanks I'll hope you will all come and join us for some middle eastern nibbles and drinks so we can actually enjoy some of the middle eastern food we've been talking about thank you very much good evening everybody Jane if you want my vote of thanks you got it very much indeed for this fascinating and impressive lecture and I think everybody will be interested to see what is going to happen in the future and whether this land acquisition which is happening at the moment will actually face the change of food security in the middle east I am not really here to comment on Jane's speech I'll leave that to you I'm here to talk about Jane's achievements over the past maybe decade or so with me but first I would like to say a couple of words first I am really honoured and it's a pleasure for me to be here for at least three reasons one of them is what Paul mentioned in the beginning of his talk that I am a service alumni and I'm sure you all realize how wonderful and how special it is to be back to your former institution and secondly also a very important factor for me that I'm standing today in front of two of my former and most favorite professors and I say that with all modesty and Professor Jane Harrigan at the Manchester University where I met both of them in the early 1990s as a student although I would like to remind that the age gap between Jane and me is only two or three years so I'm not really much younger than she in case you think Jane is very old and as the Arab adage really goes he who taught me a letter I will serve him forever and in all fairness these two individuals have taught me a lot and I am forever grateful for them and finally the reason which I'm here for is Jane's really distinguished career over the past two or three decades at least which Professor Nixon talked a lot about and really left very little room for me to talk but in addition of knowing Jane as a student a former student I've also known Jane at least over the past 11 years and we were discussing this at the beginning of today Jane thought we started publishing together seven or eight years ago and I reminded her we actually started publishing together almost 11 years ago so I've known Jane actually as a colleague as a very dear friend and as a co-author over the past 11 or 12 years in fact as I said the first paper we published together was in the year 2000 and it is no secret as Paul also said we have three books outside that Jane and I have actually published extensively together on the Middle East and North Africa and we are really trying to promote our books although I think they are good value for money Jane over the past two decades with me and with others as well have actually researched several areas perhaps she is most known for her work on the IMF and the World Bank economic programs in which she dealt with the economic impact of these programs the social impact of these programs and this has been demonstrated in her work on the Middle East and North Africa which she touched upon today when she talked about the impact of these the social impact of these reforms and then really one of the issues that we raised from Jane's talk today the relationship between instability, political instability and economic reforms much of these reforms have actually led to social retirement of the state in the Middle East and perhaps we can argue that they have been responsible for the increased number in the poor people and employed worsening inequalities and perhaps responsible for what are we seeing in the Middle East and North Africa today but Jane has gone beyond the IMF and the World Bank and she discussed and she wrote about effectively and efficiently on globalization on aid policies she also recently talked about faith based organizations and how they have started to fill a vacuum in the Middle East as a result of social retirement of the state following the implementation of economic reforms promoted by the IMF and the World Bank and she also wrote about social capital and recently radicalization, counter radicalization and terrorism and I think the variety of these subjects which Jane managed to publish by the way articles in internationally reputable journals and publishing outlets demonstrate and reflect Jane's vigor, broad and diverse knowledge and at the same time they reflect her broad and wide ranging influence and impact in various areas of social sciences. Dynamism, creativity and foresight as we have seen from today's speech plus leadership and crisis management in the most difficult of all times that come to mind when I think of Jane and when I think of the last 11 or 12 years we spent together researching. Indeed her leadership skills have been demonstrated in several of the projects we undertook together perhaps most importantly what the different project which she led in all fairness from the very beginning until the end and which resulted in two of the three books that are outside at a massive discount for you today. But as Professor Nixon really mentioned one of the things that struck me most about Jane is her insistence and focus on depicting the world as it is the real world rather than relying on downloading articles from the internet or even relying on theories or even depicting the world as it is described for us in economic and political texts. Indeed most of the work we did together being heavily relied or involved interviews and meeting the people that mattered most including either state officials members of the private sector or civil society and recently meeting even former terrorists that graduated from some radicalization programs in some of the countries which have been implementing such programs. At a personal level really I couldn't have watched for a better friend. Jane has been a very dear very close friend to me over the past 12 years and this is a very special relationship because I came from a student background and I think very few students developed the kind of relationship I have with my former lecturer. I think it's a privilege for me to come today here back to what I graduated from in 1990 as I'm much older than I look by the way to acknowledge Jane's distinguished career as a teacher as a lecturer, as an academic and as an author. In fact this occasion which brings together friends, families former and current students and distinguished scholars and authors testify to Jane's impact and influence in various areas of social sciences. And if I am really to say just one more last point for early career researchers as we call them today networking is important in research. I think that research is becoming far more competitive and it's becoming very difficult for individual young researchers to actually publish in higher rated journals and my advice to you is to follow my footsteps and develop very good relations with your distinguished and favorite lecturers. I do not really want to take more of your time again thank you very much Jane for inviting me here and I really enjoyed listening to your speech and thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to be back and to meet all of you again. Thank you.