Myths About Food Security and Water

Eckart Woertz
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Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali famously warned in 1988 that the next war in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) would be over water—not oil. Since then, there have been a number of wars in the MENA region; however, none were over water. More often than not, water has encouraged cooperation between states, rather than conflict, albeit on uneven, hegemonic terms. Even when politicians have occasionally threatened to bomb the dams of upstream riparian countries or “defend every drop of Nile water with blood,” as did former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in 2013 when Ethiopia started construction on its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, nothing happened.