Earlier this month, Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, reminded Saudis that the Kingdom was the poorest nation in terms of water resources. He also noted that the Kingdom’s dependence on desalinated seawater and unreplenishable groundwater piped across deserts and mountains makes it one of the world’s most expensive water systems, yet the Kingdom’s average water consumption is among the world’s highest.
Saudi Arabia, though in terms of size the 12th largest country in the world, also has many areas of low population density. When water shortages in the Kingdom are discussed, these factors become important. Although all Arab countries face acute water shortages, the member countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council have addressed the problem through expanding seawater desalination facilities.
More than half of the region’s desalination plants are in Saudi Arabia. The Jubail Desalination Plant on the Arabian Gulf coast is one of the largest in the world. The government has never been discouraged by the cost in constructing such huge plants. Forty billion Saudi riyals, more than half of the total outlay of the Saudi Five-Year Plan of 1980-85, was allocated for desalination projects, as water has no substitute unlike energy sources and other essential commodities.
Despite the self-sufficiency that Saudi Arabia achieved through costly desalination schemes, Saudis need to understand the gravity of the situation — particularly how it impedes economic development. The Nile and Euphrates rivers are the major natural water sources in the Arab world. Both rivers have their origins in non-Arab countries, which means that those countries and allies who control both the sources and courses of the rivers can, at their choosing, jeopardize the very existence of the Arab world in the absence of a regional riparian accord.
The Turkish dam projects on Euphrates are capable of controlling most of the water flowing to Syria and Iraq. Ethiopia with Israeli collaboration could exert the same control over the Nile and the Arab countries served by that river. Upriver dams and projects decrease the water levels at Arab dams downriver. Electric power generation at dams on the Al-Aali and Euphrates has already been affected. The water supply of the Arab world has become a critical issue as a result of the population growth, industrial development and the expansion of agricultural lands combined with the lack of sound water management policies.
Arab national security efforts have been addressed by military and defense strategies while ignoring other factors important to security and prosperity. Now the significance of both food and water supplies have been realized. Scarcity of water leads to decreases in agricultural production, which in turn forces countries to increase their reliance on food imports. Some Arabs believe that they control the nerve centers of Western industries with their oil. It is, however, the West that holds the key to the very existence of Arab states with its food exports.
How can it be otherwise as the Arab region, which has the highest rate of population growth in the world, falls in the arid or semiarid belts on the world map? The region has desert lands extending over an area of 600 million hectares, and its farmlands with unreplenishable water resources rely mainly on rainfall for irrigation.
We Arabs need to understand what the water crisis means to our world and examine the efforts of Arab governments to guarantee water to their citizens while Israel focuses attention on expanding settlements into Arab lands — particularly where the water resources are rich. That understanding should prompt us to address vulnerabilities in our water-safety policies through conservation and anti-pollution measures while taking steps to check desertification, evaporation and salination.
Although Arab farms on average use 12,000 cubic meters of water to irrigate one hectare, scientific studies say a hectare requires only 5,700 cubic meters. This fact warrants an urgent review of our traditional irrigation methods. Purifying industrial wastewater is another problem. Each cubic meter of that water requires 600 cubic meters of unpolluted water. Most of the rainwater falling in the Arab region goes to waste through evaporation or runoff in rocky regions while 30 percent of the land in the region is threatened by desertification.
Control of water resources is also believed to be a motive behind Israel’s expansionist ambitions. A close look at the pattern of Israel’s wars against the Arabs suggests a design to control the Arab world’s major water sources. This pattern can be detected in Israel’s military operations on the Syrian border in the second year after its founding, in the bid to capture the Suez Canal in 1956, the Six Day War in 1967 and the invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
Israel also has been provoking countries controlling the water sources of Arab countries to adopt anti-Arab policies. Lukewarm cooperation between the Arabs and the countries of the Nile River Basin and their lack of common interests explain the success of the Western and American companies in controlling most of the irrigation projects in the Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Kenya. The continued occupation of the Golan Heights is not purely military but an effort to keep its water resources under Israeli control as well as guaranteeing the use of Tabriah Lake and preventing any Arab attempt to develop the Yarmook River. Because of its concern for water Israel would not cede any land occupied in the 1967 War back to Arab states, even though Israel reached an agreement with Syria over the Golan Heights.
The situation calls both for strong Arab coordination and Arab-African cooperation to hasten the implementation of necessary water projects. All parties need to set aside petty squabbles and act responsibly to stand up to the threats against water resources. As Israel seems bent on violating agreements with Arabs and strengthening its relations with other countries to threaten Arab water security, we must stand against these hostile moves. If the “land for peace” principle was a political card used by the Arabs in the past now let a “water for peace” principle be the political card for the future.
(Suraya Al-Shehry is a Saudi writer. She is based in Riyadh.)
