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The more things remain the same, the more they change: 2nd year of draught in Middle East
Mideast Water Crisis Results in Water RefugeesThe Middle East is facing its worst water crisis in decades. For three summers, the annual rains have failed to come. Farmland has dried up across the region in Iraq, Syria, southeast Turkey and Lebanon. While oil was the resource that defined the last century, water and its scarcity may define this one. This winter, rain has barely settled into the hard, cracked farmland in northern Syria. There was a time when the fields were green most of the year, but the summer droughts have taken a toll. Farther east is the Badia, a vast rangeland, where thousands of people tend herds of sheep. Addami is a traditional village where the houses are white domes of baked clay. This summer, Addami was completely abandoned during the driest months. Life has never been easy in Addami. But Ismar Mohammed, a 43-year-old shepherd wrapped in a black wool robe against the cold, says he was wealthy by local standards as the owner of the area's largest herd. He had to drive his flock more than 150 miles for water. With no luck and no grass, he had to buy feed for his 275 sheep, and that meant he had to sell some of them to feed the rest. "No question, I had to do this otherwise they would die, and I had to feed my kids. Before the drought, I used to have 400 head," he says. More than 160 villages are abandoned now in Syria alone. According to a United Nations report on the drought, 800,000 people have lost their livelihood. Hundreds of thousands left once-fertile land that turned to dust and pitched tents near the big cities, looking for any kind of work. Hussein Amery, an expert on Middle East water management and a professor at the Colorado School of Mines says the policy failures that have made the emergency worse. The water crisis has been building for years. "The water refugees are a product of climate change, mismanaged water resources. It's a product of population explosion; it's a lot of things. It's a perfect storm that is wreaking havoc in the rural farming sector of Syria and Iraq," he says. At the Syrian government office for development, Mohsan Nahas says Palmyra is experimenting with new water-saving techniques. "I have talked about the oasis we've been setting up. That's being done with drip irrigation," he says. Nahas offers visitors a slideshow to illustrate what he is up against -- a dust storm so large it could be seen from space on Google Earth. Conditions on the ground were intolerable: Sand blew into houses, mixing with food and affecting people's eyesight. With the widespread drought, a food crisis is looming. For the first time, Syria now has to import wheat. Sukkar, the economist, says things won't get better unless the country changes a history of wasteful water management and outdated farming techniques. Sukkar, the economist, says things won't get better unless the country changes a history of wasteful water management and outdated farming techniques. "Unfortunately, we haven't introduced modern technology, and so we are dependent on rainfall, period," he says. But rainfall, or lack of it, is not the only culprit, he says. 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. Turkey says there is enough water for everyone, but Syria and Iraq waste their share. Amery, the water expert, says the Turks are partly right. Drought Withers Iraqi Farms, Food Supplies Iraqi rice farmers don't have enough water for this critical crop, due to second year of drought, poor water-use practices, and damming of the rivers upstream in Turkey and Syria. In the rice belt south of Baghdad, many farmers have abandoned the land and joined the urban poor. The Iraqi government has banned rice farming all together in the southern provinces because there's not enough water to sustain it. Latif Rashid, Iraq's water resources minister, explains that Iraq is what he calls a downstream country. "This is Turkey," he says, pointing to a large regional map in his office. "There are reservoirs ... and dams on every branch." Turkey and Syria are upstream countries. The map charts every water diversion built by the two neighbors over the years. "Saddam didn't care about it, he didn't have a relationship with them," Rashid says, referring to the late dictator, ousted in the 2003 U.S. invasion. "When I was appointed minister of water I sent a message to Turkey and to Syria saying: 'Look, let us talk about the water issue, and this is very important.' They were surprised." The region's water ministers are scheduled to meet in September after Rashid angrily accused the Turks of broken promises to increase water flows to the Euphrates. Obscured By War, Water Crisis Looms In Yemen Lately, the news from Yemen has been dominated by an escalating rebellion along the border with Saudi Arabia. But for water experts, Yemen has been making news for decades because of its severe overuse of a rapidly disappearing water supply. In 1998, Abdul Rahman al-Eryani was a young local aid worker explaining the desperate water situation in Ta'iz, south of the capital, San'a. Water was so scarce that some households only had it once every six weeks. Eleven years later, Eryani is now the Yemeni government minister of water and environment, Ta'iz residents are still waiting six weeks for water to flow from the tap, and in San'a, the situation has gone from bad to looming disaster. "We are in crisis. And this is expected. ... We are using almost 100 percent more than the annual renewable water that's available in San'a," Eryani says. The alluvial aquifers closer to the surface have been exhausted, and drill bits must now chew through more than 3,000 feet of earth before reaching the ancient sandstone aquifer that holds what Eryani believes is the last of San'a's reachable underground supply. No one knows precisely when the water supply will run out, but there's no doubt that it will, and probably sooner rather than later. Yemenis are responding by drilling illegal wells and pumping more water than ever. Yemen's water crisis is, in part, the inevitable result of a rapidly growing population, limited rainfall and finite water resources. But experts and ordinary Yemenis agree that policy blunders have accelerated the crisis and made it harder to fix. Despite the severe shortages of drinking water, at least 85 percent of Yemen's available water goes to agriculture, where huge amounts are wasted. For centuries, Yemeni farmers captured rainwater for their crops. But in the 1970s, well-intentioned international groups such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund showed up with a raft of incentives to get farmers to drill wells and use underground aquifers instead. Anwer Sahooly is a water expert with the German Development Corp., a major player in Yemen's water reform efforts. He says more than 1 million acres of farmland that used to be rain-fed are now irrigated with underground water, using inefficient methods that lose vast amounts of water to evaporation and leakage. Despite a new law outlawing most private wells, the drilling goes on. The sound of water pumps can be heard on farm plots all around the capital. The most popular crop of all is khat, a plant that produces a mildly narcotic leaf that Yemenis love to chew. Small farmer Abdullah al-Jidri, sporting a softball-sized wad of khat leaves in his left cheek, says many farmers would be happy to grow fruits, vegetables and grains, but they can't live without the cash brought in by khat. "With food crops, we have to wait for a year or longer to get a harvest, and if there's a problem, you won't get a crop. But with khat, you just put some water on it and you have leaves in a month's time that you can sell immediately. It's a cash crop," he says. Some long-term reforms are under way, notably the decentralization of water management to the local level. Officials are also replacing open-channel water lines and flood irrigation methods with more efficient pipes and drip hoses. Posted by: 2010-01-08 |
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