The water combined in these heavily subsidized products is effectively free at the point of production and the process of crop growth very efficiently reduces the bulk of the product and concentrates over 5000 tonnes of inputs per hectare to a mere five tonnes of exportable grain output. The governments of Middle Eastern countries have been able to ensure the entitlement of food to their peoples by engaging in world trade which has proved to be a reliable and generally stable system. Water in the Regional and Global Economies Water is a crucial resource but few in the region have grasped the relative importance of water in the provision of livelihoods. There is a tendency to regard water as of equal significance in all the sectors of a national economy. In practice, water has the capacity to provide very different livelihoods in terms of the quantity used to sustain them.
Some livelihoods have few water demands.
An extreme example would be an administrative entity of local or national government. Similarly educational institutions have few water demands. Some industries are water intensive, such as the processes associated with paper production, and some chemical and metallurgical industries use high volumes of water per day, per ton of product as well as in relation to the value of outputs. Despite the emotional and rhetorical energy expended on advocating the importance of water in agriculture and the social value of rural livelihoods, the economies of the region have already shifted to, or are shifting rapidly towards, a predominance of industry in their economies. Meanwhile the proportion of re-used urban waste water in irrigated farming has been increasing steadily so that by 1994 it had reached a level of about 21 per cent of total Israeli irrigation water.