Crise hydrique, crise alimentaire et bouleversement politique au Maghreb

The paper intends to analyse water and food security in the SEMCs and their domestic and regional implications. The water-food nexus explains how water consumption is strictly linked to the production, consumption and trading system of agro-food products. The trade liberalisation process imposed by the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) has fostered a specialisation in highly waterintensive agricultural products, such as fruit and vegetables. The dependence on basic foodstuffs imports related to this production pattern, make SEMCs particularly vulnerable to price fluctuation on international markets. Environmental problems are likely to increase the uncertainty factors that weigh on the global economy and affect especially transition economies, such as those of North Africa and Middle East. The vulnerability was evident during the global food crisis of 2008, when a number of factors, both economic - reduced supply of cereals due to bad harvests in grain exporting countries - and structural - increased demand in the emerging countries, European and US incentives for biofuel production - caused a surge in the price of basic foodstuffs (wheat, rice and maize) in international markets. The strong dependence on food, coupled with the absence of social safety dampers, due to the reduction of subsidies for basic foodstuffs, made the increase in the price of bread a detonator of the riots that triggered the 'Arab Springs'. The proposed contribution wants also to explore water and food security in its geopolitical dimension at the regional scale. Demographic pressure and climatic hazards, in recent years, have strongly undermined water and food security in Southern Mediterranean region. The authors present some competition scenarios relating to both large international water basins and fossil water aquifer shared by various countries.