The West Asia/North Africa (WANA) region contains large areas with rainy winters and hot, dry summers. The social-ecology of the region must be respected as well as the physical ecology. Dryland farming, irrigated farming and rangelands in WANA are often linked through the diets of grazing livestock. Animal products are present at low levels in traditional diets of the region, compared with diets in the US, UK, France and Japan. Population growth has been rapid and many WANA countries are expected to sustain increasing annual increments to their human populations through the year 2020. Policy issues are reviewed and several indications are noted: human capital (including institutions) needs strengthening; rangeland tenure and farm-level decision making require attention; informal seed sectors need support; fertilizer use in dryland farming can be increased within better-tuned crop rotations and with regard for weather risks and world prices; research support is needed for enhanced farm-level livestock management (including nutrition) and this needs to be better balanced with respect to current emphasis on national veterinary and animal breeding investments. Food and Feed demand has out-paced domestic production in most WANA countries and will continue to do so. The resource bases for traditional livestock raising (native pastures and crop residues) have come under serious pressure, and large feed deficits are projected. Differences are so great among the WANA countries that undiscriminating aggregations of their prospects may be seriously misleading. Sub-aggregates of the WANA countries are used here to distinguish these differences in prospects.

Research report on food policy and projections regarding food security and food requirements in the Middle East and North Africa to the year 2000 - examines trends in food production and trade since 1966; foresees increase in regional disparity between food producing countries and labour exporting and petroleum exporting countries, leading to some staple food shortages. Graphs, statistical tables.

This report examines data available prior to the Covid-19 pandemic that affected the region and the world in 2020. By 2019, the Arab Region was already off track to achieve hunger and nutrition-related SDG targets by 2030. In fact, after good progress during past decades, since 2015-17 the number of undernourished people in the region has been increasing steadily. In 2019, the number of hungry people stood at 51.4 million, or 12.2 percent of the region’s population. If such trends continue, even ignoring the potential impact of Covid-19, the number of undernourished in the region will exceed 75 million people by 2030.

This report describes the results of a survey of 1,000 multinational corporations undertaken in 1992 which asked about the importance of environmental issues in investment decisions. The survey shows that most large corporations look systematically at environmental questions when they decide where to invest. Environmental problems appear to have discouraged a number of investments across different industries and the question of liability for past pollution problems at industrial sites was the greatest concern for investors.