2:17PM
Chart of the Day: Water and Food in Mideast
Friday, August 17, 2012 at 2:17PM 
Close the Straits of Hormuz, says the WSJ, and you shut down more than oil flow. Ninety percent of food in the PG is imported.
Water is perhaps the most complex of the region's resource-security puzzles. Gulf countries have some fo the lowest rainfall rates and smallest water resources in the world. Gulf countries satisfy demand by desalinating seawater, but that leaves them vulnerable if their desalination plants malfunction or are attacked.
tagged Middle East, agriculture, food, water | in Chart of the day | Email Article | Permalink | Print Article
Middle East, agriculture, food, water | in Chart of the day | Email Article | Permalink | Print Article 
Reader Comments (1)
They wouldn't be completely cut off; trucking the food in from Turkey and from ports on the Red Sea and Gulf of Oman would still be an option. Ditto Israel and Lebanon if they weren't destroyed or tied up in civil war in this hypothetical war's opening stages. That would be expensive, though. More so if they sent women, children, elders, wounded/handicapped and foreign workers into exile on the truck's return trips to the port.
The really scary part is the info in those grey boxes. Both the shrinkage in their water supplies and the famine that could result if the desalinization plants get hit--a Middle East war could easily destroy the Arab countries as modern nations.