Assessing how agricultural virtual water exports affect Morocco’s water and food security

Morocco experiences permanent water shortages because its water supply falls below 650 cubic meters per person each year. The country needs to use its water supply from agricultural exports to solve its domestic nutritional needs according to its water supply limitations which create a fundamental policy issue. This study addresses a research gap in the empirical literature: despite growing evidence on virtual water flows no study has formally quantified the mediating role of water stress in the causal chain linking virtual water exports to undernourishment in an arid export-oriented economy. We built five multivariate OLS models that used annual time-series data from FAOSTAT and the World Bank between 1990 and 2023 which we assessed through unit-root tests and cointegration analysis and the Baron and Kenny mediation framework with Sobel test significance. The results show that a 1% increase in virtual water exports brings about a 0.46% increase in adjusted water stress and a 0.05% decrease in food availability and a 0.15% increase in undernourishment prevalence. The analysis of formal mediation shows that water stress functions as the mediator for 64% of the total effect which results from EW_EXP on PoU (indirect effect: 0.463 × 1.654 = 0.766; Sobel z = 2.41, p < 0.05). The findings demonstrate that Morocco's agricultural system contains fundamental conflicts which require a shift towards farming methods that use less water and systems that combine water management with food production.