Food Security
Volume 7, Issue 6, December 2015
http://link.springer.com/journal/12571/7/6/page/1

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Editorial
Introduction to the special section “Food Trade Relations of the Middle East and North Africa with Countries of the Tropics: Opportunities and Risks of South-South Cooperation”
Jordi Bacaria, Karim El Aynaoui, Eckart Woertz
Initial text
We are very pleased to present this special section in Food Security. Its papers were first presented at the conference “Tropical Agriculture as “Last Frontier’? Food Import Needs
of the Middle East and North Africa, Ecological Risks and New Dimensions of South-South Cooperation with Africa, Latin America and South-East Asia.” The conference was jointly held in Barcelona on 29–30 January 2015 together with our co-organizers, King’s College, London (KCL), the Getulyo Vargas Foundation in Sao Paolo and Wageningen University.

The special section is one of the latest products of the strategic partnership between CIDOB, the Barcelona Center for International Relations, and the OCP Policy Center in Rabat, a partnership that has been effective since 2010. Both institutions have embarked on a joint project on food security and agriculture, covering key areas such as food politics, tropical “agriculturalization”, climate change mitigation, development cooperation, as well as socio-cultural, institutional and gender aspects of water and food security. The choice of these topics is testimony to the importance our partners attribute to agriculture and food security as strategic fields as well as game changers in development discourse and practice…