Egypt Threatens Nile Basin Agreement

Ministers of the nine African Nile River littoral nations are moving ahead with plans to establish a permanent body tasked with determining equitable use of the world’s longest river despite unresolved differences between Egypt and Sudan. Agreement among seven of the nine states is expected to be finalized next month. The nine countries, grouped in the World Bank-sponsored Nile Basin Iniiative, failed at a meeting earlier this month in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, to reach final agreement.

Next month’s agreement would crown some ten years of torturous efforts to agree on a mechanism to equitably distribute water and could create a model for other conflict-prone river basins. Egypt and Sudan have charged the agreement could threatn their historical right to water security. Time will whether the two major littoral states have the power to thwart next month’s planned agreement. Speaking to the Egyptian parliament, Egyptian water and irrigation minister Mohammed Allam warned that “if the Nile basin countries unilaterally signed the agreement it would be considered the announcement of the Nile Basin Initiative’s death.”

Egypt and Sudan base their rights on past treaties to which other Nile riparian states were not parties. The most recent of these treated was signed by Egypt and Sudan in 1959. Under that treaty Egypt is entitled yearly to 55.5 billion cubic meters of the 84 billion cubic meters of water that reach it’s High Aswan Dam each year. Egypt and Sudan insist that the rights they derive from this and an earlier treaty be incorporated in any future agreement.

The majority of Nile riparian states who were not signatories of those treaties insist that they are no obliges to recognize them or bound by them and reject the concept of historical rights. As an alternative to the planned new body that would have to negotiate the terms of equitable distribution, Egypt is pushing for creation of Nile River Basin Commission that would be a deliberative body authorized to take decisions only by consensus.

Egypt argues that the rights it derives from past treaties do not threaten the water security of downstream riparian states. Egyptian officials note that those rights account for only five percent of the Nile’s total reserves of 1,600 billion cubic meters. They also point out that with the exception of Ethiopia, Egypt’s concern about water security is the most acute.

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.

Corruption fuels crisis in water-poor Yemen

Published on Eurekastreet.com.au

James Dorsey February 02, 2010

As Yemen struggles to defeat Al Qa'ida, to end a tribal uprising in the north and to prevent the south from seceding, water could turn out to be the thing that tips the country over the edge. Like much of the Gulf, Yemen faces a reduced water supply resulting from climate change and from rising temperatures compounded by poor management.

Without radical reform of agricultural and other policies, the Yemeni capital Sana'a stands in a decade at most to become modern history's first capital to run out of water, according to a recent projection by the World Bank-funded Sana Water Basin Management Project. Rapidly dwindling water resources are likely to lead to disputes, reignite riots against a government already widely viewed as corrupt, nepotistic and incompetent and strengthen Al Qa'ida's Yemeni affiliate, Al Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

One of the world's water poorest nations, Yemen is consuming its limited water resources at a far faster rate than it is able to replenish them. At Yemen's current seven per cent population growth rate, consumption can only increase. Yemen's population is set to almost double from 23 to 40 million over the next two decades.

Alongside unemployment, water is driving increased internal migration and urbanisation. Some 70 per cent of Sana'a's population either buy their water from private vendors or collect free water from local mosques. Vendors sell a liter of water for $0.15, a steep price in a country where incomes average $2 a day. The vendors draw their water from wells near the capital and deliver it in tanker trucks or jerry cans. With no enforced standard for potable water, quality varies.

Water extraction rates in Sana'a are believed to outstrip replenishment by a factor of four. Sana'a's water basin is close to collapse. So is the basin in Amran, 50 km north of Sana'a. Of the 180 wells tapped a decade ago by Sana'a's municipal water company, only 80 remain active. In some districts of the capital, taps have shut down. In others, supply is interrupted at least once a month.

In 2008, the Eurasia Group reported that 19 of Yemen's 21 aquifers were not being replenished and that in some cases non-renewable fossil water was being extracted. Wells in several parts of the country have run dry. The falling water table means wells have to be dug deeper at levels of 200 m and more where the water is contaminated.

Alongside rising domestic consumption, Yemen's water crisis is fueled by corruption, poor or no resource management and wasteful irrigation. Agriculture consumes most of Yemen's water. Qat, whose leaves are consumed as a daily stimulant by the majority of Yemeni men, is Yemen's foremost agricultural product. The more water the plant gets, the more productive it is, making water conservation a non-starter.

Yemen's lack of resource management is evident from the fact that the government created a separate ministry for water and environment only in 2004. Six years later, the country still suffers from lack of effective regulation and oversight, particularly with regard to groundwater. As a result, digging of wells remains uncontrolled and so does extraction of groundwater.

Water Minister Abdul Rahman Fadhl Iryani, unable to enforce licensing of new wells, estimates that 99 per cent of water drilling in Yemen is unlicensed. Moreover, Yemen does not regulate the import of drill rigs, which are not subject to custom duties or taxation. Yemen is estimated to have some 800 privately owned drill rigs, a number far higher than most other countries.

Subsidised diesel powers landowners' water pumps. Yemen has so far resisted donor demands that it abolish diesel subsidies ever since rioters fearing price hikes and higher inflation in 2005 forced the government to drop efforts to do so. Abolishment of subsidies would also cut into profits from diesel smuggling that are raked in by the country's elite.

Yet, the more the Salih government postpones biting into the sour apple, the sourer it gets. Donors may be betting on the president's son, whom Salih is grooming as his successor. A ten-point reform plan drafted by deputy finance minister, Jalal Omar Yaqoub, that includes abolishing subsidies and streamlining bureaucracy, has curried favor with the United States and other donors.

The water crisis plays into the hands of Al Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula , the Al Qa'ida offshoot that claimed responsibility for the failed Christmas Day bombing of a USA airliner. To compensate for its lack of control in large parts of the country, the government has delegated responsibility for water to local authorities, establishing water companies primarily in urban areas. It is in those tribal areas, like Marib and Shabwa, where no such companies were created that AQAP is strongest.

Economic and political reforms demanded by donors will have to go beyond cost-cutting to incorporate more efficient water use and distribution, pricing to encourage water conservation and development of sustainable agriculture. Without such reforms, water could be at the core of Yemen's next generation of conflict.
James DorseyJames M. Dorsey is a freelance journalist who has covered ethnic and religious conflict for the past 35 years for publications like The Christian Science Monitor and The Wall Street Journal. He has visited Yemen twice in recent months.