The Biggest Mideast Crisis You Probably Don’t Know Enough About

by Tom Lippman

The Middle East’s seemingly endless conflicts are diverting attention and resources from a graver long-term threat that threatens 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 water 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.

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 specter that has often been evoked but has never materialized. 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 Organization, 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, long enough, to make possible some comprehensive, multilateral solution.

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 meters 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 lot can be done in countries with deep pockets and enough time to focus on this issue.

Saudi Arabia reorganized its government in the 1990s to centralize 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 privatized 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 there 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 organizers 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.

Photo: Much of the Middle East is seen in this night-time image photographed by one of NASA’s Expedition 31 crew members aboard the International Space Station as it flew some 240 miles above the Mediterranean Sea on June 4, 2012. The Nile River Delta is easily recognizable in center frame, and city lights make it easy to see both Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt near the Delta. Two Russian spacecraft — a Soyuz (left) and a Progress — appear in the frame while they are docked to the station.

Thomas Lippman

Thomas W. Lippman is a Washington-based author and journalist who has written about Middle Eastern affairs and American foreign policy for more than four decades, specializing in Saudi Arabian affairs, U.S.- Saudi relations, and relations between the West and Islam. He is a former Middle East bureau chief of the Washington Post, and also served as that newspaper's oil and energy reporter. Throughout the 1990s, he covered foreign policy and national security for the Post, traveling frequently to Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East. In 2003 he was the principal writer on the war in Iraq for Washingtonpost.com. Prior to his work in the Middle East, he covered the Vietnam war as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Saigon. Lippman has authored seven books about the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. He is also an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, where he serves as the principal media contact on Saudi Arabia and U.S. – Saudi relations.

SHOW 5 COMMENTS

5 Comments

  1. Was Israel invited to attend the conference?
    Did Israel attend?

  2. If there is no consensus as to a solution, but a lot of talking, just what is accomplished? If there wasn’t all the warmongering taking place, especially in the M.E., perhaps those desalination plants could be built to take up the slack. But then, that would deprive the munition manufacturers of the $$$billions in yearly profits. Maybe Israeli planners will just unleash all those WMDs in its arsenal and blow the crap out of the other part of the M.E., thereby lowering the population count. Who knows what lurks in the evil minds of warmongers, especially today.

  3. Norman…
    Solving problems usually starts with discussion, talking, thinking.

  4. To DMS, case in point: how long have the Israelis & Palestinians been discussing their problem, and what has it produced? To achieve a solution, both sides have to give as well as receive, hopefully on an equal basis, not just one sided, wouldn’t you agree?

  5. Fanack is a digital publisher of information about the MENA Region, I’m project manager on the Fanack Water Files. We believe good and reliable information must come first before institutions and infrastructure. We will launch the first waterfile describing all facts and figures on water related to Jordan and the RSDS project. I love to get in contact with the author of the blog, Mr Lippman.

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