Yemen: Water crisis threatens swelling population

Some residents [in the Yemeni capital Sanaa (pop. 2 million)] receive piped city water only once every nine days and others get none at all. The sinking water table means the municipality can now operate only 80 of its 180 wells, said Naji Abu Hatim, a Yemeni expert at the World Bank. [In February 2009, the World Bank approved a US$ 90 million grant for the Water Sector Support Project for Yemen, which is being co-funded by Germany and The Netherlands].

Boys fill up their a jerry cans with water from a public tap in Sanaa August 27, 2009. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah (Yemen Environment Society)

“People don’t believe the magnitude of the problem. They see a little cloud and say, ‘oh, God is still there, he can give us water’,” he added. “But water is Yemen’s number one problem.”

That might seem a startling claim given that the country is also grappling with a tribal revolt in the north, violent unrest in the south, al Qaeda militancy and widespread poverty.

But water shortages in the southern city of Aden are already fuelling violence. One person was shot dead and three were wounded, two of them police, during water protests on Aug. 24 [2009].

And fast-depleting aquifers make Yemen’s plight the starkest in a desperately water-scarce region. Local disputes over water rights may turn violent, especially in tribal areas. Competition for supplies between cities and the countryside may sharpen.

“Yemen’s water share per capita is under 100 cubic metres a year, compared to the water poverty line of 1,000 cubic metres,” said Hosny Khordagui, Cairo-based head of the U.N. Development Programme’s water governance programme in Arab countries.

[...] Unlike wealthy Gulf oil states, Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, is ill-placed to fill the gap between supply and demand with desalination. [...] Desalinating seawater and pumping it 2,000 metres uphill to the inland capital would be hugely expensive. Water could be transferred to Sanaa from another basin, but this might spark conflict with nearby provinces that are also parched.

[...] Water scarcity is forcing many poorer villagers to sell up and move to Yemen’s cities, where few have the skills to thrive, even though they are expected to send money home to relatives. From the 1970s, Yemenis turned swiftly from rain-fed farming to irrigation using water pumped from new tube wells, encouraged by the government and foreign donors keen to expand production.

“Finally they found irrigated agriculture was unsustainable because of the depletion of groundwater,” Abu Hatim said.

Agriculture sucks up more than 90 percent of water used and a third of that goes to irrigate fields of qat, a mild narcotic intrinsic to the daily social life of most Yemenis. Mismanagement of water resources is one reason why Yemen’s plight is worse than that of neighbours such as Oman, argues Jac van der Gun, director of the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre in The Netherlands.

[Y]emen’s northern highlands have been suffering a two-year drought. “The rains this year have been poor and late,” said Ramon Scoble, a water expert for the German development agency GTZ who works in Amran province, just north of the capital.

[...] The government, backed by foreign donors, began applying a comprehensive strategy for water resources, irrigation, water supply, the environment and capacity building in 2005. But experts describe implementation as patchy. The World Bank’s Abu Hatim said the programme was a palliative measure.
“It will not solve the problems, only alleviate them to buy time. The catastrophe is coming, but we don’t know when.”

Source: Alistair Lyon, Reuters, 30 Aug 2009:

Iraq: water shortage threatens two million people in south of country

A water shortage described as the most critical since the earliest days of Iraq’s civilisation is threatening to leave up to 2 million people in the south of the country without electricity and almost as many without drinking water.

An already meagre supply of electricity to Iraq’s fourth-largest city of Nasiriyah has fallen by 50% during the last three weeks because of the rapidly falling levels of the Euphrates river, which has only two of four power-generating turbines left working.

[...] Down river, where the Euphrates spills out into the Shatt al-Arab waterway at the north-eastern corner of the Persian Gulf, the lack of fresh water has raised salinity levels so high that two towns, of about 3,000 people, on the northern edge of Basra have this week evacuated. “We can no longer drink this water,” said one local woman from the village of al-Fal. “Our animals are all dead and many people here are diseased.”

Iraqi officials have been attempting to grapple with the magnitude of the crisis for months, which, like much else in this fractured society, has many causes, both man-made and natural.

Two winters of significantly lower than normal rainfalls – half the annual average last year and one-third the year before – have followed six years of crippling instability, in which industry barely functioned and agriculture struggled to meet half of subsistence needs.

[...] During the last five chaotic years, many new dams and reservoirs have been built in Turkey, Syria and Iran, which share the Euphrates and its small tributaries. The effect has been to starve the Euphrates of its lifeblood, which throughout the ages has guaranteed bountiful water, even during drought. At the same time, irrigators have tried tilling marginal land in an attempt for quick yields and in all cases the projects have been abandoned.

“Not even during Saddam’s time did we face the prospect of something so grave,” said Nasiriyah’s governor, Qusey al-Ebadi. Just east of the city, the Marsh Arabs are also on the edge of a crisis – unprecedented even during the three decades of reprisals they faced under the former dictator.

“The current level of the Euphrates cannot feed the small tributaries that give water to the marshlands,” he continued. “The people there have started to dig wells for their own survival. There is no water to use for washing, because it is stagnant and contaminated. Many of the animals have contracted disease and died and people with animals are leaving their areas.”

Nowhere is Iraq’s water shortage more stark than in what used to be the marshlands. [...] The Euphrates, once broad and endlessly green [...] has now dropped more than 1.5m.

[...] Further up the river Sheikh Amar Hameed, 44, from Abart village said: “We have lost the soul of our lives with the vanishing water. We have lost everything. We are buying drinking water now. The government must find a solution. The young will all become thieves. They have no prospects.”

Iraq’s water minister, Dr Abdul Latif Rashid, this week estimated that up to 300,000 marshland residents are on the move, many of them newly uprooted and heading for nearby towns and cities that can do little to support them.

The Marsh Arabs are semi-nomadic and large numbers have remained displaced since Saddam drained the marshes in 1991.

[...] Officials have tried to compensate by digging wells and bores, especially in the ravaged provinces of the south and in Anbar, west of Baghdad. Delegations have also travelled to Turkey and Syria, where they were warmly received, but have achieved few changes. “We were expecting much more of a release from Turkey,” Iraq’s water minister Dr Abdul Latif Rashid said. “Iran has been less receptive. We have had no response from them at all.”

Source: Martin Chulov, Guardian, 26 Aug 2009

Israelis restrict Palestinians’ water supply

After World Bank issues report, commissioned by the Palestinian Authority on the condition of water accessibility in the West Bank, Israel claims the reports authors are biased. To understand the conditions on the ground, how they’ve been addressed, and whether the so-called peace process succeeded in addressing them, The Real News speaks to LifeSource Project, a non-profit organization focusing solely on the issue of water. Susan Koppelman and Taysir Arabasi tell The Real News’ Lia Tarachansky the Mountain Aquifer, the biggest supply of fresh underground water is pumped by Israel even though it lies almost entirely in the West Bank. They also speak about restrictions on Palestinians to dig water wells, and their dependence on the Israeli national water corporation, Mekorot.

View the Real News video report below.

Source: Real News, 24 Aug 2009

Yemen, Aden: One dead in protest over water cuts

At least one Yemeni was shot dead and three wounded when protesters clashed with police on Sunday [23 Aug 20009] in Aden in southern Yemen where several districts have gone days without water, police and witnesses said. At least two of the wounded were police, the sources said. South Yemen, formerly an independent state that merged with the north in 1990, has seen months of clashes over complaints of marginalisation by central government based in Sanaa.

Source: Mohamed al-Mokhashef, Andrew Hammond, Reuters, 24 Aug 2009

Egypt: 40 per cent drink unsafe water

The lack of clean water is one of Egypt’s most urgent problems, a Dutch newspaper reports. Corruption, pollution and wastage are to blame, it says.

When the inhabitants of the small town of Al-Barada (pop. 50,000) in Qalyubia Governorate, north of Cairo, finally got piped drinking water two months ago, it was cause for celebration. Until they discovered that sewage was polluting the water and a thousand people contracted typhoid.

Now Al-Barada again must rely on water tankers. According to lawyer Gamal Yehi, who is representing the interests of the inhabitants, what has happened is a typical result of the corruption that is endemic in the whole of Egypt. Good plans are poorly implemented with inferior materials by unreliable contractors and an incompetent government.

Al-Barada’s groundwater is polluted because the drains, which are supposed to transport wastewater to the river Nile, are blocked with waste.

Every year 550 million cubic metres (m³) of industrial wastewater, 2.5 billion m³ of agricultural wastewater and an unknown amount of sewage flow into the Nile.

Nearly 40 per cent of Egyptians has unsafe water. As a direct result, 17,000 children die every year from diarrhoea and kidney failure rates are among the highest in the world.

At 900 m³ per capita per year, Egypt is below the water poverty line of 1,000 m³ per capita year. And, according to World Bank findings, that figure is expected to fall to “670 cubic metres by 2017 unless policies are implemented to sustainably manage growing demand.”

Egypt’s dependence on the Nile has often lead to tensions with its downstream neighbours. In 1999, the ‘Nile Basin Initiative’ was established among the Nile riparian states to promote cooperative development of the river. Negotiations remain difficult and have recently been stalled for 6 months.

Despite the water crisis, Egyptians continue to waste water. According to the World Bank this is because water tariffs are too low. UN-appointed expert Catarina de Albuquerque reported that the “tariff for drinking water in Egypt is considered one of the lowest tariffs in the world, with over 92 percent of households spending less than 1 percent of their household budget on water and sanitation”.

Inefficient irrigation systems are the reason why most water, 85 per cent, is used by the agricultural sector. Still this is not enough as unequal distribution forces many farmers to use untreated wastewater to grow their crops. In the beginning of August 2009, the minister of Agriculture announced that all fruit and vegetables irrigated with sewage have to be destroyed.

Source: Alexander Weissink, NRC Handelsblad [in Dutch, subscriber-only access], 12 Aug 2009