Interview TONY ALAN - KLC and SOAS

The fundamental role that water resources play in human development has been highlighted in multiple ways; the United Nations SDGs underline 17 different goals and over a hundred targets to be achieved by 2030. Out of 169 SDG targets, 59 were found to have direct links and synergies with the water goal SDG6 (UN Water, 2016). Careful policy making and interventions need to be implemented to avoid conflict among sectors and tradeoffs must be well established. The Integrated Water Reso ...

Climate change threatens to reduce the water flow in the Nile and increase the frequency and severity of droughts and floods in Egypt, which already suffers from water scarcity. This threat is a looming crisis as it seriously undermines the Government of Egypt’s long standing food self-sufficiency approach to food security, an approach which is wasteful of increasingly precious arable land and water resources, while achieving neither more food self-sufficiency nor meaningful food se ...

Oil dominates Nigeria’s economy- “Africa’s Giant”. Oil revenues are both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because they are the single most important contributor to government revenues; a curse because, through the Dutch Disease, they undermine the productivity and competitiveness of other non-oil sectors, primarily agriculture and agri-processing; and manufacturing, two major sources of non-oil employment and incomes. Since Nigerian governments did not try to counter the Dutch Dis ...

The world food price index collected for the last 60 years by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) hit its highest record in March, declining gently in April. Pandemic, war and death in Ukraine, and droughts in the last 2 years… Such a combination looks apocalyptical. Now it is adding global hunger risks, because of the food price crisis. The rise in global food prices started in mid-2020 because supply chain disruptions triggered food stockpiling. Mobility r ...

Known for being a climate change hotspot, Morocco is at the forefront of a climate disaster. Consequences are already being felt, whether in the form of increasing temperature or a downward trend in precipitations, which directly threaten the water security and, by extension, the social-ecological systems of the country. The systems by which food, energy, and water are produced, distributed, and consumed heavily depend on one another. Their implicit feedbacks and links are not linea ...

Addressing the increasing demands for water, energy, and food requires a coherent methodology to ensure that  societies have access to them and that conflict over them is avoided. For example, agriculture and food production  require water and energy; energy production also requires water and, in some instances, agricultural products.  Water distribution and treatment can be very energy intensive. Therefore, the benefits of approaching the Water- Energy-Food (WEF) nexus in an integr ...

Our Senior Fellow Rabi Mohtar has co-authored with our economist, Fatima Ezzahra Mengoub along other researchers a research paper entitled « A Water-Energy-Food Nexus approach for conducting trade-off analysis: Morocco’s phosphate industry in the Khouribga region » in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Journal (Volume 24, Issue 10). The study objective was to develop and use the Water-Energy-Food Nexus Phosphate (WEF-P) Tool to evaluate the impact of Morocco’s phosphate industry ...

This paper is about the basic principles which should guide fertilizer policy for smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa It is not about detailed country-specific prescriptions on the “how” of policy. This important task should constitute the substance of detailed country studies. The overarching goal here is to use fertilizer to spearhead and sustain an African Green Revolution (GR). In this paper, fertilizer use is not considered as an end in itself, but as a necessary mean ...