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:
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