False Economy - Alan Beattie [48]
In the Middle East and North Africa, the agricultural use of water has a much higher political and environmental profile than elsewhere. Crop production in temperate zones like Western Europe is largely based on rainfall. The water is contained in the soil and replenished naturally, rather than pulled out of rivers or streams. But in the Middle East, most soils are arid and farmers make widespread use of irrigation. Globally, only around 11 to 12 percent of surface freshwater (water in rivers, lakes, and streams) is stored in reservoirs. For the Middle East and North Africa, the figure is 85 percent. The result is widespread use of irrigation. Iran, for example, has the fifth-largest irrigated area of farmland of any country in the world, and holds enough water in reservoirs to irrigate a lot more.
Thousands of years after the pharaohs, irrigation remains vital to Egyptian agriculture. Traditional water-holding methods based on capturing the annual floods were radically updated in the twentieth century when the Aswan Dam was built, and year-round irrigation was provided to Egyptian agriculture. Big dams have acquired a bad reputation in recent decades: their economic benefits have been systematically oversold and the environmental and social costs of blocking large rivers and resettling villages often ignored. But Aswan appears to have been one of the considerable successes. Its direct benefits from irrigation and electricity production are equal to about 2 percent of the country's gross domestic product. It has also protected farmers against poor harvests and the residents of the Nile valley against floods, a form of insurance reckoned to be worth another 0.4 to 1.7 percent of GDP.
Yet limited water resources, no matter how well managed, cannot always keep pace with a rising population. In terms of the water needed to support its consumption of food and goods, and for drinking and washing, the Middle East as a whole started running short in the mid-1970s.
Politicians in the region, concerned at the accusation that they have left their countries literally high and dry, fiercely deny that they have run out of water. But by this they generally mean that they have enough water for domestic washing and cooking and to maintain the industrial and agricultural jobs currently in existence. That may be true. But it is a considerably different concept, narrower than the "water footprint," which takes account of how much water each nation consumes, not how much it uses in its own economy. The difference is made up by the net amount of embedded water in imports—how much is sent out of the country minus how much is brought in. Tony Allan, the academic who invented the concept of virtual or embedded water, reckons that with their populations growing and water use rising, Israel and the Palestinian territories ceased to have enough water for self-sufficiency as early as the 1950s, Jordan in the 1960s, and Egypt in the 1970s.
Stark warnings that the wars of the future will be fought over water, not oil, have become a commonplace. The dry Middle East, a cockpit of ethnic, religious, and political tensions, is the obvious place for them to start. Yet the big rise in population and water use in recent decades has manifestly failed so far to spark widespread conflict.
There has been tension over water in the region for millennia. Gideon, delivering the Israelites from the hands of the Midianites in the
Book of Judges in the Old Testament, instructs them to seize the river when overthrowing their oppressors. "And Gideon sent messengers throughout all Mount Ephraim, saying, Come down against the Midi-anites, and take before them the waters unto Bethbarah and Jordan." The ancient Egyptians were perennially concerned with preventing the Nile from being diverted or blocked, and they mulled invading Sudan, upstream from Egypt, to secure it. When