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Page added on May 20, 2014
The Biggest Mideast Crisis You Probably Don’t Know Enough About
The Middle East’s seemingly endless conflicts are diverting attention and resources from a graver long-term threat that looms over the whole region: the growing scarcity of water. And the situation will get worse before it gets better — if it ever does get better.
Years of war, careless water supply management, unchecked population growth, ill-advised agricultural policies, and subsidies that encourage consumption have turned a basically arid part of the world into a voracious consumer of water. The trajectory is not sustainable.
Those were the gloomy if unsurprising conclusions of a three-day conference on the subject in Istanbul last week. From Libya to Iraq to Yemen, too many people and too many animals have stretched water resources beyond their limits. Some countries where the urgency is greatest, including Syria and Yemen, are the least equipped to stave off serious water crises.
Jordan, always short of water, has been overwhelmed by a flood of refugees from Syria. Iraq, which once had ample water, has lost critical supplies to war and to dams built by Turkey upstream on the Tigris and Euphrates.
Egypt has twice as many people as it did 50 years ago, with no additional water resources. The isolated Gaza strip has been grappling with a water crisis for years. And Yemen’s scarce water supply is being gobbled up by the unchecked production of qat, a high-water crop with no nutritional value. Chewing the mildly narcotic qat leaf is Yemen’s national pastime.
“If you give them more water, they’ll just grow more qat,” one gloomy conference participant said.
But not all the news is bad. Stable countries with lots of money, led by Saudi Arabia, are making notable progress in supply, management and consumer education.
Elsewhere, however, the prognosis is grim. No one predicted an outbreak of “water wars,” or armed conflict over water supply, a spectre that has often been evoked but has never materialised.
But at some point in the not too distant future, water shortages could provoke mass migrations, human hardship, crop failures and some form of “triage” among populations as governments are forced to allocate supplies, said conferees, who cannot be named due to conference rules.
It’s not as if all this has gone unnoticed. The Middle East’s water issue has been the subject of news articles, analyses by groups such as the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, and studies by think tanks and humanitarian groups for years.
The Istanbul conference of scientists, policy analysts and academics from eight countries — conducted on an island in the Sea of Marmara under the title “High and Dry: Addressing the Middle East Water Challenge” by the Hollings Center and the Prince Muhammad Bin Fahd Strategic Studies Program at the University of Central Florida — is the latest of many such gatherings.
But little has come of them because the region has never been stable enough for sufficient time to make any comprehensive, multilateral solution possible. According to analyses by the World Bank, the U.S. State Department and others, a majority of the countries defined as “water-poor” — those with access to less than 1,000 cubic metres per person per year — are in the Middle East and North Africa.
The State Department also predicts that climate change will add to the problem by bringing “consistently lower levels of rainfall.”
No government or international agency can increase rainfall or snow runoff. But the Istanbul conferees heard that the example of Saudi Arabia — the world’s largest country without a river — shows that a great deal can be done in countries with deep pockets and enough time to focus on the issue.
Saudi Arabia reorganised its government in the 1990s to centralise water planning and management. Most of the country’s water for personal and household use is supplied by massive desalination plants. The decision to build them, starting in the 1970s, was an obvious one for the kingdom.
But the plants are expensive to construct and operate, leaving them beyond the financial reach of a country like Yemen.
Saudi Arabia meanwhile leads the region in the recapture and reuse of wastewater. Under a new regulation from last year, for example, its giant dairy farms are required to operate on recycled water purchased from the National Water Company rather than on groundwater as in the past.
Once the world’s fifth- or sixth-largest exporter of wheat — the production of which requires massive amounts of water — Saudi Arabia has banned the cultivation of wheat as of 2016 and is refocusing its agriculture on greenhouse production of vegetables and fruit.
Growing animal fodder crops such as alfalfa has been banned; owners of livestock are required to purchase imported fodder, conference participants said. Plagued by leaks in distribution pipes that drained off as much as 25 percent of the water it had, Saudi Arabia privatised its distribution network and encouraged foreign engineering and management companies to participate.
Saudi Arabia has raised the price of water for businesses and institutions, but it has not yet ended the subsidies for households that make water so cheap; there is little incentive to limit consumption.
Doing so would be politically risky in a country where subsidies for water, gasoline, and electricity are expected by a population that has no vote or other influence over the government.
Egypt, by far the most populous country in the region, has a different consumer attitude problem. Egyptians have taken the availability of water for granted since completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1970. As a result, they use waster casually in the home and pump more irrigation water than is necessary onto their fields.
But Egypt’s biggest concern now is Ethiopia’s plan to construct a giant hydroelectric dam on the headwaters of the Nile, reducing the flow and the amount of water stored in Lake Nasser, behind the Aswan Dam.
Asked recently if negotiations over Nile water allocations were taking place between Egypt and the upstream countries, Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy replied, “No. I wish they were.”
Participants in Istanbul agreed that there is no single remedy for the water crisis. The available fixes range from the simple and obvious, such as consumer education and the installation of low-flow bathroom fixtures, to the aspirational, such as the development of desalination plants powered by solar energy, which are thus affordable.
As usual with such events, the organisers will prepare a paper outlining recommendations. The fact is, however, that solutions, even if available, will be hard to implement until the shooting stops, refugees are resettled, and governments are sufficiently stable to address them. That won’t be soon.
14 Comments on "The Biggest Mideast Crisis You Probably Don’t Know Enough About"
Davy, Hermann, MO on Tue, 20th May 2014 5:55 am
Water is the weak link in ME. Again systematically we see a region at limits of growth facing diminishing returns with a population in overshoot to carrying capacity. That weak link to this overshoot is water affecting food, energy, and development. This region is in a water, energy and food predicament. Water stress is a weak link that effects food and energy. We can hardly see increased food production in these areas with water stress. Food stress requires imports. Imports require more oil sales. In the case of Egypt, Yemen, and Pakistan we are talking handouts. Energy is being stress in two directions in the ME. In areas like KSA you see energy intensive desalinization coming on line. The other energy stress is a growing population requiring more energy and more energy sales to support that growth. The end is near to this growth. The Arab spring was the first signs of social fabric stress. The next step is social fabric failures in a region vital to the global economic engine. There are no solutions to this predicament of population, energy, water, and food stress in the ME. Then you throw into that nasty mix political instability and the great game politics to spice it up. When we look at systematic risks we can reduce that to regions of critical nodes affecting global contraction and or collapse. ME is a critical node due to oil and failed states potential. This region is also in a “goldilocks compression” for its primary income source namely oil. The price cannot go any lower without upsetting the social fabric. The price cannot go any higher without ruining their export market and all the while these societies require more resources to solve their growth predicament. The number one issue in the ME is population growth. It is among the highest in the world in a region already in overshoot.
TIKIMAN on Tue, 20th May 2014 6:07 am
I’ll think of this article as I wash and wax my Honda after work.
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta…
Kenz300 on Tue, 20th May 2014 6:27 am
Quote — ” Years of war, careless water supply management, unchecked population growth, ill-advised agricultural policies, and subsidies that encourage consumption have turned a basically arid part of the world into a voracious consumer of water. The trajectory is not sustainable.”
—————————
Endless population growth is not sustainable and only leads to more poverty, suffering and despair.
Overpopulation facts – the problem no one will discuss: Alexandra Paul at TEDxTopanga – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNxctzyNxC0
GregT on Tue, 20th May 2014 9:35 am
The Middle East isn’t the only place on Earth with looming food and water crises…..
There will be plenty more poverty, suffering, despair, and societal unrest, wars, and death. Our species is in overshoot, thanks in a big part to fossil fuels. As those fossil fuels continue to become more expensive, and less available, populations everywhere will go into decline. No country will be exempt.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Tue, 20th May 2014 9:43 am
exactly, Greg, but, ME is closer then others and systematically TBTF because of oil and geography
Northwest Resident on Tue, 20th May 2014 9:53 am
Saudi Arabia has some serious problems brewing — as do all ME countries obviously. The Saudi royals are like a small group of people surrounded by vicious, starving, snarling dogs and the only thing preventing those dogs from rushing in and tearing the royals to pieces is that the royals — so far — have been able to keep throwing a constant supply of bones to the dogs to keep them gnawing and distracted. But the royals are running out of bones and the dogs are beginning to smell blood. When the hammer falls and the dogs rush in for the kill, I suspect most of the Saudi royals will be able to escape. But for those few who miss the last flight out, their end will be quite ugly.
I’m pretty sure that the ME countries would have already descended into chaos and mayhem were it not for the heavy presence of U.S. military forces in the region. And if the ME countries descend into chaos and mayhem, so does the rest of the world because without that ME oil, BAU is toast and the global economy stops dead in its tracks.
noobtube on Tue, 20th May 2014 9:57 am
Why is it Americans are always screaming about other people’s so-called problems?
Is that projection?
At least the Middle East still produces something the rest of the world wants and that they can use themselves… it is called oil.
What does the United States or Europe produce for the world?
That’s right. Nothing of importance.
So, the biggest population problems are in the United States and Europe. But, of course, they never want to admit that they are the population problem on this planet, because somehow they are superior to everyone else, because they say so.
Let’s see how superior you are going to be when you can’t steal other people’s materials anymore to feed yourselves and live the self-indulgent, self-important, self-satisfied lives to which you think you are entitled.
Northwest Resident on Tue, 20th May 2014 10:14 am
Another insane and nonsensical rant from noobtube. Just another one in a long series. “What does the United States or Europe produce for the world?” How about drilling rigs and other equipment needed to get that oil out of the ground and transport it to market, noobtube, you fucking moron.
Are you trying to be a complete idiot, or does it just come naturally?
noobtube on Tue, 20th May 2014 10:41 am
I have one question, just one question…
whose energy and materials are the United States and Europe using to produce those drilling rigs and other equipment?
It sure isn’t coming from Europe, which is essentially an energy desert (except maybe coal in Germany).
It sure isn’t coming from the United States which uses its fuel for personal cars and the military.
Just admit the United States and Europe are just leeches and parasites on the rest of the world.
It will make the descent far easier to understand for those who think they are better than everyone else simply because they are Amurikkklan.
This Earth doesn’t want or need ‘Merica… the worst thing to happen to this planet, since… well, I can’t think of anything worse.
Plantagenet on Tue, 20th May 2014 10:54 am
What country do you live in, Noob?
GregT on Tue, 20th May 2014 11:25 am
“exactly, Greg, but, ME is closer then others”
Agreed Davy, but watch the ME closely, what happens in the ME, isn’t going to stay in the ME.
bobinget on Tue, 20th May 2014 12:40 pm
CHINA is addressing its water problem with dams and North to South pipelines.
I can see the same strategy in the US as flood control in one sector balances drought in another.
Even Climate Deniers will see the need. There is no political reason not to take steps need to maintain.
I’m also beting California steps up to solar powered desalinization.
All this climate mitigation infrastructure will use plenty of energy further exacerbating GW. Sure, but do we have another choice?
clueless on Wed, 21st May 2014 12:06 am
noobtube is my man. he always has the balls to say what it actually the americans and the europeans can’t accept to admit.
GregT on Wed, 21st May 2014 12:46 am
clueless,
I couldn’t have given you a better name myself. Very revealing.