South-South Solutions for GCC Food Security and East African Agricultural Development: What potential role for the IsDB and Qatar North Mozambique?

Abstract

South-South Solutions for GCC Food Security and East African Agricultural Development: What potential role for the IsDB and Qatar North Mozambique? With a fast growing world population and decreasing arable land availability per capita, food security remains in the 21st Century a major global challenge, particularly in regions marked by strong demographic growth. This paper proposes new institutional arrangements for South-South cooperation in order to promote and improve inter-regional food security, with a case study taken from two regions of the West Indian Ocean. In the oil-rich but water-poor region of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, new institutional arrangements for food imports need to become increasingly performant and resilient to external economic and political disturbances. Meanwhile, in Eastern Africa, a region with abundant water and arable land resources but relatively short of economic capital, the countries need to attract investments for their agriculture and agribusiness sector to develop, mature and become structurally more resilient to meteorological and other disturbances. Inter-regional partnerships, if carefully designed and taking into consideration previous failed attempts, can see these two regions increase their economic exchanges, participate to the diversification of their economies while improving their food security. The case of the strong complementarity between Mozambique, an East African Least Developed Country (LDC) with vast water and land resources, and Qatar, a hyper arid Gulf country with a very high GDP/capita and several Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs), demonstrates how relevant such South-South collaboration could be and how they could actually be framed and implemented. The paper gives an important role to third actors such as multilateral development banks, as facilitators, insurers and guarantors of the reliability and mutually beneficial nature of the proposed International Public Private Partnerships (IPPPs) and related infrastructure and commercial investments.