GRM 2010 Report - Centre of Islamic Studies - University of ...

security; water pricing, and privatization. She also presented Singapore’s experience in water
management, exploring the feasibility and repercussions of the transposition of water management
policies. She emphasized environmental education and awareness to be a major cornerstone to
solve the issue of water scarcity.
From water the discussion moved on to food, with food security being the topic of the
workshop’s next paper. Salma Bani from the Ministry of Municipalities and Agricultural Affairs
in Bahrain presented a paper on the impact of Climate Change on Food Security with special
reference to Bahrain’s Sustainable Agricultural Development. She started with a definition of
what is meant by food security, and she gave a brief account on the conditions of agriculture in
Bahrain. She used food security as a conceptual framework to evaluate how government food
policy interacts with the local food systems to produce food security and analyzed the impact of
these policies on sustainable agricultural development and highlighted the main achievements in
terms of enhancing the level of food self-sufficiency. After a discussion on the issue of agricultural
production and climate change, she outlined a strategic option for sustained agricultural growth
and increased food productivity. Also, she presented her thesis that Bahrain should concentrate
its production on crops that the country has a comparative advantage in and adopt modern
agricultural techniques, such as hydroponics.
One of the main themes of the workshop, that of Environmental policies in the Gulf was then
discussed. Bringing together a lot of what was previously discussed, Mohammed Abdel Raouf
focused on the use of Economic Instruments in Environmental Policies. His introduction covered
policy failures and market failures in the environmental field, and then he illustrated the differences
between Command-and-Control and Economic Instruments and gave examples on each. He
indicated the importance of designing a policy mix of CAC and EI and to be supported by
awareness and education.
Then came the discussion of how to implement environmental sustainability in the decision
making process. Kassem El-Saddik discussed this in his paper which sought to explore how to
integrate environmental aspects in the decision making process in the GCC. He highlighted
the institutional and legal frameworks of the widely known tool, namely Environmental Impact
Assessment and described its scope – mostly limited to project level. He then discussed
the potential to take a further step to mainstream environmental assesment within sectoral
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