Martin Keulertz

American University of Beirut | AUB · FAFS

Solving the global water crisis requires water to be economically mobile. Well-regulated water markets that can allocate scarce water resources to their best economic, social and environmental uses will require rigorous water accounting; access to the resource by legal, transparent and enforced permits; and a market where permitted water can be sol...

Society’s greatest use of water is in food production, a fact that puts farmers centre stage in global environmental management. Management of food value chains, however, is not well set up to enable farmers to undertake their dual role of feeding a growing population and stewarding natural resources. This chapter introduces an analytical framew...

Systems of producing, consuming, and distributing water, energy, and food involve trade-offs that are rarely explicitly considered by firms and policymakers. The idea of the water-energy-food “nexus” represents an attempt to formalize these trade-offs into decision-making processes. Multinational food and beverage firms operating in arid regions we...

If present trends continue, it is unlikely that increasingly overused ecosystems subject to deterioration and depletion will be able to meet global water, food and energy needs. Current academic thinking is that scarcity, pollution, mismanagement and misallocation of natural resources will impact every sector on which humankind depends for survival...

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is the world’s largest importer of food, especially of cereals, sugar and poultry. Tropical regions have gained growing importance as suppliers of such commodities in recent decades. Latin America and Africa in particular have been identified as sources of future agricultural growth that could provide...

This introduction sets the scene for the special issue compiled by Martin Keulertz, Eckart Woertz and Tony Allan.

Since the global food crisis of 2008 states have encouraged international agro-investments by their respective private sectors or have undertaken them directly via state-owned companies and sovereign wealth funds. This chapter analyses the crucial role played by national governments with the help of three case studies: the Gulf countries, China, an...

The Water–Energy–Food (WEF) nexus is a development challenge in the Arab world, particularly in the ‘core nexus countries’ with low to mid-incomes in which limited water endowments permit agricultural production, such as Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Algeria, Sudan and Jordan. The WEF nexus is often conceptualized in mere technocratic terms, ye...

Renewable energy technologies can address trade-offs between water, energy and food, bringing substantial benefits in all three key sectors. This report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) looks at how adopting renewables can ease trade-offs by providing less resource-intensive energy services compared to conventional energy tech...

To many analysts, global water governance is about getting the institutions right: more accountable water users and more public participation in decisions. But are we barking up the right tree? In this analysis, we argue that when analysing global water governance, one needs to look at the global players that really matter – an exclusive group of g...

The recent global food crises have highlighted how the agro-food system tends to be subject to powerful agribusiness players, with thus far unidentified consequences for global water security. By connecting hydro-hegemony and virtual water concepts, this study illustrates the Western dominance over the virtual water embedded in international agro-f...