Water rather than ethnic and religious conflict is likely to be the real game changer in the Middle East in the next 20 years says Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) director Jon Alterman. Writing in the Washington think tank’s Middle East Notes and Comment , Alterman argues that the drying up of the region’s groundwater wells and decreasing water quality will push water to the top of the agenda, force widespread changes in lifestyle and strengthen a widespread sense of government failure and incompetence.
Already the Middle East is the world’s most water-starved regions with 10 of the 15 water-poorest countries located in the region. Ironically, Alterman notes that when Saudi King Abdul Aziz first invited geologists to explore his desert kingdom, he was hoping to find water rather than oil. Oil wealth has propelled urbanization, changed lifestyles in water-consuming ways and provided the funding to exploit massive underground water supplies to secure those lifestyles by, for example, achieving food self-sufficiency.
Such policies served in part to ensure the longevity of authoritarian regimes that needed to be seen to be providing standards of life people had become accustomed to with the flow of petrodollars. The Gulf states, where water if priced was heavily subsidized, rank today among the largest consumers of water per capita of the population. As a result, conservation measures such as market-dictated pricing of water are proving to be politically contentious and potentially dangerous mechanisms which most regimes have so far shied away from.
Nonetheless, Arab regimes can no longer escape the fact that current water policies are unsustainable and that the region’s agricultural revolution if unchecked will render it dry in the not all too distant future. Saudi Arabia has drawn a first conclusion from this realization by declaring that it would phase out the growing of wheat in the kingdom by 2016.
Alterman warns that the Middle East’s wells are a finite resource that are being exploited to an extent far beyond their ability to replenish themselves. Already, wells are being dug ever deeper and producing water that is increasingly less pure. The Yemeni capital Sana’a is set to become in the next ten years the world’s first capital to run out of water. The Jordanian capital could follow Sana’a hot on its heels.
It’s a doomsday scenario: agriculture collapses and major cities are left with no water to serve their inhabitants. The fall will be harder in those parts of the Middle East that don’t have the petrodollars to fund expensive and energy-intensive desalination. More than ever, water will become political and a litmus test for already questionable government credibility. The political dividing lines would likely harden as a result of the fact that some of the Middle East’s largest agricultural water users are also among its most powerful families, including its rulers. This, Alterman notes, makes it all the more difficult to impose and enforce the changes needed to evade disaster.
Nevertheless, Alterman says, “the situation is not entirely hopeless.” Alterman advocates reforming agricultural policies, enhancing farming methods, aggressively recycling waste water, enhancing government oversight of wells, introducing pricing regimes that would encourage conservation and investing in renovation of water supply systems. Some of those steps, governments could take without significant political risk and pain, others they are likely to see as so controversial that they could spark public expressions of disaffection. The question is whether they recognize soon enough that they are between a rock and a hard place.
