False Economy - Alan Beattie [49]
The tension between the modern state of Israel and its Arab neighbors has always been liable to flare into conflict, and water seems like a good candidate to act as a recurrent casus belli. In the 1950s, not long after its creation, Israel started to build a canal system known as the National Water Carrier. The plan was to transport water from the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee, the freshwater lake that lies upon it, to the Negev Desert. The Arab reaction was less than welcoming: Syrian artillery opened fire on the Israeli construction teams in 1955, and King Hussein of Jordan denounced "the theft of Arab waters." After years of attempts by the United States to mediate came to nothing, the Arab League devised a plan to divert tributaries of the Jordan inside Syria's borders to foil the Israelis. The proposal promptly invited air and artillery bombardments by Israel to prevent the waterworks being completed.
Yet since then, despite rising populations and water use and the completion of the National Water Carrier, no water war has broken out. Israel's 1994 peace treaty with Jordan did include a water-sharing deal; but well before then, the water constraint was eased by the tendency of both countries to start importing water embedded in food. In the three decades after 1970, the value of the food import bill for the Middle East and North Africa increased seventeen times. A lot of this growth came along with the massive rise in global oil prices in the 1970s, since it gave the oil-producing nations of the region higher export earnings with which to buy their imported food. Between 1970 and 1982, the value of per capita agricultural imports for the region increased tenfold—a big increase even at a time of high inflation. (The need for export earnings to import virtual water is an important one: dry countries in sub-Saharan Africa are actually quite small buyers of virtual water because they have so few exports with which to pay for them.)
The situation for Jordan, a small country with a population of 6 million—which has grown tenfold over the past half-century—is particularly dramatic. Eighty percent of its water needs are met by the import of virtual water, far higher even than that of other dry countries in the region. Each year, more water is now imported into the Middle East and North Africa in virtual form than physically flows into Egypt via the Nile. This, as Tony Allan says, is the kind of water redistribution that engineers could only dream of. Middle Eastern politicians and farmers may regard reliance on imports as evidence of the failure of their agricultural skills, but it makes more sense to see it as a resounding success for trade. Egypt, with a population of about 80 million, is now the world's second-biggest wheat importer, buying about half its grain from abroad. It would take about a sixth of the entire water stocks held in the Aswan Dam reservoir for the country to revert to growing all its own cereals.
But this is not to say that the Middle East keeps all its own water at home. Jordan and Israel have a thriving export trade selling vegetables, herbs, and other high-value agricultural produce to Europe. On the face of it, it seems perverse to import water with one set of crops while sending it abroad with another. In reality, it can be perfecdy logical. The weight or value of what can be grown with the same amount of water varies considerably from crop to crop. It takes about a thousand cubic meters of water to grow a ton of vegetables, for example, compared with 1,450 cubic meters for a ton of wheat, while a ton of beef uses a striking 42,500 cubic meters of water via the feedstock used to raise cattle. Beef is the biggest single contributor to the flow of virtual water for precisely this reason. It makes up 13 percent of global virtual water trade, compared with 11 percent for soybeans and 9 percent for wheat.
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