by Mohammed TAFRAOUTI
In a new episode of the “Economic Guest” program on France 24 Arabic, a UN voice emerged warning of the profound transformations ravaging food conditions in the Arab region. Moroccan expert Dr. Hammou Laamrani, Economic Affairs Officer in the Food and Environment Policy Unit at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), revealed during a live interview from Beirut that the Arab world is no longer suffering only from a food security crisis, but is facing a comprehensive collapse of food systems across all their productive, economic, and environmental components.
This interview followed the release of a joint UN report, involving major organizations such as FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization, and ESCWA, which announced that hunger levels in the region have reached their highest rate in over two decades, amidst escalating conflicts, worsening climate change, and rising import costs.
At the beginning of the interview, Dr. Laamrani confirmed that the countries most affected by hunger are those mired in conflicts, such as Yemen, Sudan, and Gaza, Palestine, where instability is the most acute factor disrupting agriculture, transport, distribution, and driving food costs to record levels.
Specifically regarding Yemen, the UN expert explained that the country was already suffering from structural imbalances in production, marketing, and storage, before the war added fuel to the fire. This includes widespread destruction of infrastructure, difficulties in importing food and production inputs, water scarcity, and low land productivity.
Dr. Laamrani said, “Yemen is experiencing one of the worst hunger crises in modern history,” stressing that the situation there heavily relies on humanitarian aid.
However, the real shift in the dialogue came when discussing the roots of the crisis. El Amrani argued that the time has come to move from focusing on securing food to adopting a comprehensive vision for food systems. He said: “It is no longer enough to talk about food security, as the crisis has become one of collapsing food systems—from production to consumption, including imports, food waste, climate change, and weak social protection.”
Dr. Hammou laamrani pointed out that food policies in Arab countries still suffer from deep structural gaps, evident in low agricultural productivity compared to the global average, high levels of food loss during production, storage, and transport stages, excessive reliance on imports, subsidy policies focused more on consumption than production, fragile social safety nets in the face of price shocks, and weak integration of technology and agricultural mechanization into production processes. He emphasized that overcoming these imbalances requires rebuilding more resilient food systems, based on developing local production and increasing productivity, improving storage, transport, and marketing infrastructure, redirecting subsidies to reach producers and vulnerable groups, enhancing the efficiency of supply chain management, and building real capacity to confront climate and economic shocks.
Dr. Laamrani added that overcoming these imbalances cannot be achieved without the effective involvement of the private sector as a central partner in agricultural investment, value chain development, and promoting innovation and technology. He explained that its role extends beyond financing to include improving quality, adopting sustainable production practices, building partnerships with small producers, and providing modern infrastructure for storage, processing, and marketing. He stressed that creating an enabling environment for the private sector through clear laws, stimulating incentives, and long-term investment strategies would help reduce the food gap and enhance the resilience and ability of food systems to withstand shocks.
Laamrani concluded by affirming that UN reports indicate that more than seventy million Arabs suffer from acute hunger, while about one hundred and eighty million people face food insecurity—figures he described as “alarming and call for collective Arab action that restores the importance of food systems as a system of life, not merely an arithmetic equation of supply and demand.”
To follow the ful interview click here
