Water Not Wars Likely To Change Middle East Politics

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.

Jordan Identifies Water as a Policy Priority

One of the world’s water-poorest countries, Jordan celebrated World Water Day by identifying its water shortage as the greatest challenge to its development. Per capita water consumption in Jordan, according to the Jordanian water and irrigation ministry is far below the international water poverty line of 1,000 cubic meters per person per year. The United Nations ranks Jordan alongside Kuwait, the UAE and Bahrain as one of the world’s ten most thirsty countries with a per capita water consumption of 145 cubic meters a year. The country’s water shortage is heightened by the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Iraq and an annual 2.3 percent population growth.

The situation is made worse by constantly increasing demand. The country’s population of six million is growing at a rate of 2.3 per cent annually. Jordan’s water resources have also come under increased strain with the influx of 500,000 to 700,000 Iraqi refugees since the US-led war in Iraq began in 2003.

“One of the key challenges the water sector faces is that the supply-and-demand equation is not balanced,” The National quotes Water and Irrigation Minister Mohammad Najar as saying. “Also water resources are limited, and the (process) of depleting underground water … are major challenges the ministry is facing.” Najar said the ministry was having difficulty stopping illegal pumping of underground and surface water and enforcing laws and regulations. Officials say mismanagement and lack of maintenance further contribute to the shortage. An estimated 40 percent of the kingdom’s water is lost annually to worn-out pipes, leakage and water theft.

The National quotes water expert Dureid Mahasneh as also blaming ill-advised agricultural policies. “We wrongly export our water in the forms of tomatoes to Europe,” Mahasneh says. “There is no need to grow apricots and peaches in winter as they consume so much water. The priority should be for drinking water.”

The government hopes that two major projects will help alleviate the shortage. The Dissi project, which is expected to provide Amman by 2013 with 100 cubic meters of water per year from an ancient desert aquifer 325km south of the capital near the border with Saudi Arabia. The project, which kicked off this month, is expected to be complete in 2013 at a cost of US$990m (Dh3.6 billion). The other is a controversial plan to build a canal linking the Red Sea and the Dead Sea Canal at an estimated $2bn. The project has long been a target for environmentalists and been mired in the intricacies of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Water rises to top of Syrian Agenda

As the Syrian capital Damascus braces itself for another exceptionally cold winter week, severe water shortages as a result of climate change is leaping to the top of the government’s priorities. UN and Syrian government officials warn that that the water crisis coupled with environmental degradation is likely to worsen over the coming years. Torrential rains in Damascus that have overwhelmed drainage systems and turned the desultory trickle of the Barada river into a torrent are just one indicator of the mounting crisis.

Increased rainfall is doing nothing, however, to alleviate the country’s water shortage. “A study of rainfall over the past 25 years in Syria shows that the intensity is increasing, but the actual levels are either constant or, in some cases, decreasing,” The National quotes Faris Asfari, an agricultural engineer involved in compiling a detailed report on climate change in Syria, who consults for the UN as saying. “Increasingly the rain is torrential and that actually causes severe damage, especially to soil. It has a severe impact on the sustainability and productivity of the land it adds to desertification problems.”

Similarly, Jordan recently reported to the the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC that its water resources will be depleted by climate change even if the kingdom witnesses an increase in precipitation. The report warned that climate change will severely impact the quantity of monthly surface water runoff. It that if current rainfall levels increased by 20 per cent, it would not compensate for the water lost due to the expected rise in temperatures.

A Syrian government report compiled for last month’s environment summit in Copenhagen concluded that most Syrian cities were suffering from shortage of water as a result of reduced rainfall, severe drought and more frequent dust storms. As a result, some 300,000 people in the eastern region, once a thriving farming area have been forced off their land to mostly become internal refugees in Damascus. The government report warns that such dislocations are prompting a decline in standards of health and education. Residents in the central governorate of Hama say drought has dried up the Al Assi River whose water serviced the Al Qantara Hydrostation. They now depend on local wells available only at depths of 600 meters where it contains contaminants that make it unsafe for drinking.

Syrian officials say the situation is further aggravated by the absence of agreements, primarily with Israel, on how to equitably share inadequate water resources. Israel draws some 15 percent of its water supply from the Golan Heights conquered from Syria in 1967. The Heights run up to the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s only freshwater lake, and include significant parts of the Jordan River’s catchment area. Control of water resources, and Israel’s insistence that it retain sovereignty over the Sea of Galilee, have been one of the main stumbling blocks in failed peace talks.

Nonetheless, environmental scientists say the Syrian government bears significant responsibility for water shortages and land degradation, with decades of mismanagement, corruption and inefficiency exacerbating existing problems. Land not fit for cultivation was widely farmed in the 1980s as part of a food security policy and although it was stopped in the 1990s, severe damage was done.
Syria uses 90 percent of its water for mostly inefficient irrigation. “Irrigation systems here are only 38 per cent efficient, which means we throw away 62 per cent of all of our national water supplies before it even reaches the crops,” Yousef Meslmani, the national environmental affairs project director with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Damascus told . The National. “We have irrigation channels built on soluble rock – which is the worst thing you can do – and the engineers told them it was bad idea, but they did it.”