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.

Water and the War on Terror

by Steven Solomon

Grist.org

While leaders in Washington have been war-gaming the national security risks of climate change, they’ve only started to connect the dots to the closely related threats emanating from the growing crisis of global freshwater scarcity. At first blush, water and national security may not seem to be interlinked. But the reality, as narrated in my new book WATER: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization", is that the unfolding global water crisis increasingly influences the outcome of America’s two wars, homeland defense against international terrorism, and other key U.S. national-security interests, including the transforming planetary environment and world geopolitical order.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali famously predicted 25 years ago that the “next war in the Middle East will be fought over water.” While that has yet to come to pass, the greatest present danger stems from failing nation-states—and not just in the bone-dry Middle East. With world water use growing at twice the rate of human population over the last century, many of the Earth’s vital freshwater ecosystems are already critically depleted and being used unsustainably to support our global population of 6.5 billion, according the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the situation can only be expected to get worse as the population pushes toward 9 billion by 2050. As great rivers run dry before reaching the sea, groundwater is mined deeper and deeper beyond replenishment levels, and water quality erodes with growing pollution, an explosive fault line is cleaving between freshwater Haves and Have-Nots across the political, economic, and social landscapes of the 21st century.

Among the water Have-Nots are the 3.6 billion who will live in countries that won’t be able to feed themselves within 15 years due largely to scarcity of water—likely to include giant India. Throughout history, states that have been unable to feed themselves with homegrown or reliably imported cheap food have stagnated, declined, and often collapsed, with grievous adjustments in living standards, population levels, and regional turmoil.

Health and humanitarian crises are likely to emanate from the dark side of the Have-Not divide where 1 billion abject poor lack regular access to clean, fresh water for minimal needs and 2.6 billion don’t have basic sanitation. Upriver water Have states increasingly exert control over the precious water flows to their dependent neighbors downstream, while within nations the wealthy and those with greatest political clout commonly enjoy the formidable competitive advantage of better, and often subsidized, access to the best water resources. Global warming exacerbates the water crisis with extreme, unpredictable floods, droughts, glacier melts, storm swells, and other water cycle–related depredations that fall disproportionately on already water-insecure, Have-Not regions and overwhelm existing, fragile water infrastructures. Such dislocating events are expected to create 150 million environmental refugees within a decade.

A tumultuous adjustment to the freshwater scarcity crisis lies ahead, and in our global society the feedback effects will buffet even the security of distant nations. Two cases from the headlines—Yemen and Pakistan—illustrate some of the problems and challenges.

Yemen

Globe. Arid Yemen is an impoverished, failing state, home to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which helped to train and arm the would-be Detroit-bound, Christmas suicide bomber from Nigeria. The Yemeni government is not much better than a large, corrupt tribe competing for control of the nation’s diminishing resources through patronage payoffs and proxy alliances with other strong tribes. There is warfare in the north between Houthi tribesmen and Saudi-backed government forces, while politically and economically disaffected southerners are trying to secede. The government is also battling al-Qaida, which flourishes in ungoverned no-man’s-lands.

Terrorism—which claimed 17 U.S. sailor lives in the attack in Aden Harbor on the USS Cole in 2000, and was beaten back for a few years with the help of U.S. drones—is resurgent. The Yemeni government’s policy of routinely releasing captured or repatriated terrorists after little more than a promise not to do it again frustrates the Obama administration’s efforts to shut the Guantanamo Bay prison, where about half of the remaining 200 prisoners are Yemeni.

One of the world’s most dire freshwater scarcity crises underlies Yemen’s extreme poverty and faltering state. The average Yemeni lives at eight times below the world freshwater availability poverty line, and has 1/20th the world average. Less than half have access to enough clean, fresh water for basic needs, while five-sixths lack adequate sanitation. Illegal well drilling is ubiquitous. Yet when the government tried to remove state subsidies for the diesel fuel powering the illegal pumps, riots forced it to desist. The lion’s share of the groundwater is commandeered (and used wastefully in flood irrigation) to grow the cash crop qat, a narcotic stimulant chewed by Yemeni men and an integral part of Yemeni culture.

The net result is an ecological and human catastrophe unfolding in slow motion: Water tables around the country are plunging—in many places two to four times faster than the natural replenishment rate. Soaring 7 percent annual population growth, adding to the current 23 million Yemenis, compounds the water scarcity crisis. As much as two-thirds of rural violence, including some deaths, is related to water. As life in rural areas grows untenable, Yemenis are crowding into already swollen cities, where water riots are not uncommon and mosques dispense minimum free water as charity to the poorest. In the capital, San’a, 100 of the 180 wells in use a decade ago have run dry. Within just five to 10 years, it is widely predicted to become the world’s first capital city to literally run out of water.

To try to retain some control, the government delegated power over water to local authorities and urban water companies. Al-Qaida is strongest in places like ancient Marib and Shabwa where no water companies operate, and it gains the support of the populace by providing health care and helping to dig wells. What viable diplomatic policy America and its allies can pursue in such a situation is unclear, as international financial aid simply disappears down the government’s sieve of corruption.

Pakistan

Earth. As dangerous as Yemen is as a failed state, it pales in comparison to Pakistan, which is nuclear-armed, Taliban-besieged, regionally fractious, and severely water fragile. Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida’s core leadership are believed to be hiding out in its rugged northwest regions.

American leaders had a big fright in April 2009 when Muslim fundamentalist Taliban fighters broke out of the northwestern provinces and struck within 25 miles of the Indus River’s giant Tarbela Dam, a critical site they’d attacked through terrorism before, and only 30 miles from the capital, Islamabad. The Tarbela Dam is the strategic heart of Pakistan’s irrigation, hydropower, and flood-control network. If the Taliban damaged or took control of the giant dam, and gained critical leverage over Pakistan’s food and energy security, the government’s viability would be imperiled.

While Pakistan’s American-trained elite counterterrorism forces and air power quickly rallied to beat back the Taliban, the U.S. responded to the Taliban’s show of strength in the spring of 2009 by accelerating its $7.5 billion five-year aid package to Pakistan—the lion’s share of which is focused on rehabilitating the nation’s perilously deteriorating and inadequate agricultural and hydropower waterworks. During her tumultuous October 2009 visit to Pakistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was repeatedly warned about the nation’s impending freshwater crisis.

At the heart of Pakistan’s crisis is the Indus River, its water lifeline and foundation of its farm economy, which provides the livelihood for 60 percent of Pakistanis. It’s already so badly overused that its water rarely reaches its now dried-up delta, and its huge fertile irrigated basin cropland is heavily reliant on overpumped groundwater and in dire need of a refurbished drainage system to remove poisoning salts. The Indus River also faces an alarming loss of up to a third of its flow by 2025 from the global warming–induced melting of its source Himalayan glaciers. In the same period, moreover, the nation’s population will grow 30 percent more to 225 million. Global climate change is further menacing monsoonal Pakistan with more unpredictable and intense seasonal floods and droughts. In a country where the water-storage capacity to buffer prolonged drought and loss of hydropower is only 30 days—1/30th as much as in the U.S. and 1/15th as much as in China—the effects of climate change can quickly become catastrophic and destabilizing.

Complicating Pakistan’s water crisis is that most of its water originates outside its borders, in archenemy, nuclear-armed India—with whom it has fought several wars and still heatedly disputes the Kashmir border region—as well as in Afghanistan and China. The Indus water dispute with India, which helped trigger the first war between the countries, was resolved with a 1960 treaty. But under the strain of population growth and climate change, the treaty is in dire need of renegotiation. One source of tension is that both countries are building new hydropower dams on Indus tributaries in the Kashmir. Pakistan is also highly suspicious of India’s increased aid to Afghanistan for dams on rivers that flow into Pakistan; it fears it is an Indian subterfuge to put Pakistan in an east-west hydrological vise once America leaves Afghanistan. For their part, the Pakistanis have awarded their dam contract to China, India’s adversary with whom it has its own water disputes and testy political relations.

The chessboard of Pakistan’s destiny is immensely complex, of course. But how it manages its critical water challenges—both from internal and external pressures—is one of the paramount variables in whether it will hold together as a coherent nation-state. Given its nukes, radical Muslim fundamentalists, and regional stature, what happens to it is of grave significance to American national security and Asian regional security.

The global water crisis is unfolding in many other places around the world, and in many different ways, posing vital national security challenges to the U.S. Israel’s conflicts with Palestinians and Syria include contentious disputes over the vital water supplies of the West Bank and Golan Heights, which Israel won in the 1967 war and which today account for two-thirds of Israel’s total freshwater. Iraq’s national viability and prosperity depend significantly on how much water its upstream neighbors Syria and Turkey (the Middle East’s rising water superpower) permit to flow downstream. How tightly China, in its dam-building frenzy for economic growth, squeezes the waters from the 10 major Asian rivers originating in its Tibetan plateau will affect the prosperity and political robustness of downstream nations across Asia, China’s geopolitical status, and with it, U.S. national security interests. Whether and how big a food importer India becomes as its own water management runs short will affect global food prices, and conditions of famine and health, in food import–dependent countries worldwide.

Water and national security may not seem at first to be interconnected. But they are-increasingly so as the global freshwater scarcity crisis deepens.

Qat Gulps Yemen's Depleting Water Resources

Yemen's Ministry of Agriculture has begun supporting coffee, nuts, and grapes as alternative crops to qat because they require far less water. Qat farming has expands by 4000 to 6000 hectars a year and consumes 30% of the country's irrigation water. As a result, groundwater supplies around Sana'a are rapidly diminishing. More than 4000 wells in Sana'a have been dug to irrigate qat fields, reducing water levels by an average of 3-6 meters a year. The Agriculture Ministry in cooperation with the World Bank are opening a center to educate farmers on the need to reduce qat cultivation. In addition, Yemen will use part of a 7-million-euro grant from Germany's Technical Cooperation Agency (GTZ) to promote alternatives to qat farming

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.

Yemen’s Water Crisis Threatens Unrest and Strengthens Al Qa’ida

As Yemen struggles to defeat Al Qa’ida, end a tribal uprising in the north and prevent the south from seceding, water could turn out to be the lubricant that tips the country over the edge. 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 and reignite riots against a government already widely viewed as corrupt, nepotistic and incompetent.

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 percent 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 urbanization.

Some 70 percent 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 Sanaa 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 kilometers 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 nonrenewable 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 meters 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 vast majority of Yemeni men, is Yemen’s foremost agricultural product. The more water the plant gets, the more productive 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% 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.

Subsidized 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 being raked in by the country’s elite.

The water crisis plays into the hands of Al Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the AQAP 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 areas like Marib and Shabwa where no such companies were created that AQAP is particularly strong.

Mideast Water Crisis Produces Region's First Water Refugees

A two-part series by NPR focuses on the Middle East's worst water crisis in decades as a result of climate change, drought and mismanagement. The series focuses on the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which affects Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon and the fact that this already troubled region is confronting a new phenomenon: water refugees.

Contrary to popular perception, water seldom is the single cause for violent conflict, but it certainly can accelerate and exacerbate tensions. Perhaps, the latest example in the region is Yemen, whose multiple conflicts are enhanced by a falling water table and acute water shortage. Water plays a key role in Turkey's relations with Iraq and Syria, who believe that Turkey uses its control of the Tigris and Euphrates head waters as a tool to realize its regional ambitions. NPR reports:

"Syria and Iraq blame Turkey's huge network of dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for reducing water supplies by 50 percent.Turkey is the site of the headwaters of a river system that Syria and Iraq depend on. An informal agreement determines the flow downstream.

'When we had bad relations with Turkey, they reduced the flow of water despite the agreement, and now, thank God, we have excellent relations with Turkey, and hopefully, we will not see any cutoff of water,' Syrian economist Nabil)Sukkar says.

Turkey says there is enough water for everyone, but Syria and Iraq waste their share. (Hussein) Amery, (a Middle East water management expert and professor at the Colorado School of Mines. says the Turks are partly right. 'The issue is water but it goes far beyond water, he says. Amery says the key to head off a water crisis is more efficient management of a scarce resource. But he adds politics, not climate, is the problem. A lot of Arabs believe that Turkey is trying to assert itself as a regional superpower,' he says, "and water is being used as a tool to advance that interest"....

In Turkey, Gun Kut, a water expert at Istanbul's Bogazici University, expresses an often-heard criticism in response to Arab complaints: 'Quit wasting the water and there will be enough for everybody.' Kut says outdated farming techniques and bad water management decisions waste a dwindling resource. 'Simply insisting on others to release more and more water while the population is going up, the need for food is going up, won't work,' he says."

Indeed, for much of Turkey's modern history, Turkey viewed its control of the head waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates as a Turkish resource much like oil is an Arab resource. With other words, it was Turkey's right to control access to the rivers' waters. Former Turkish President Suleiman Demirel did not mince words, when he in 1992 inaugurated the Ataturk Dam, part of the Southeastern Anatolia Project, one of the world's biggest irrigation and electric power schemes. "We have a right to do anything we like," Demirel said at the dam's opening ceremony.

That attitude, however, may be changing as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan seeks to position his country as a regional superpower. In a sign that Turkey is seeking cooperation rather than confrontation, Turkey and Syria agreed in the first week of January to joint management of some water resources.