We cannot drink oil!
By
Talib Murad Elam
28.9.2013-Erbil
Water covers
71% of the Earth's surface and is vital for all known forms of life. On Earth, 96.5% of the planet's water is found in seas
and oceans, 1.7% in groundwater, 1.7% in glaciers and the ice caps of
Antarctica and Greenland, a small fraction in other large water bodies, and
0.001% in the air as vapor, clouds
(formed of solid and liquid water particles suspended in air), and precipitation.
Only 2.5% of the Earth's water is freshwater, and 98.8% of that water is in ice and groundwater. Less than 0.3% of all freshwater is in rivers, lakes, and the atmosphere, and an even smaller amount of the Earth's freshwater (0.003%) is contained within biological bodies and manufactured products.
Only 2.5% of the Earth's water is freshwater, and 98.8% of that water is in ice and groundwater. Less than 0.3% of all freshwater is in rivers, lakes, and the atmosphere, and an even smaller amount of the Earth's freshwater (0.003%) is contained within biological bodies and manufactured products.
Overuse of freshwater resources in the Gulf and North Africa.
Last autumn the
ex-Amir of Qatar addressed the Food Security Summit in Rome last autumn and one
wonders if our friends in Qatar believe that they are going to lead us in
solving the region’s food security and water problems. If they could it would
indeed be a miracle but the best that we could hope for is that they now
recognize the damaging consequences caused by the Gulf States in some cash
deprived countries.
The arid lands of
the Gulf cannot be used for agriculture so these states have been busy grabbing
all the available agricultural land and water in poor countries, mainly in
Africa, and now they are eyeing the Kurdish region of Turkey, and while they
offer to” help” the poorer countries ’‘develop their agriculture”’ they ensure
that the food produced will go to feed the Gulf. In addition the populations of
the Gulf States are swollen by foreigners working there and indeed there may be
four to eight expatriates for every local inhabitant and these states would
have less of a food security problem if they did not rely on excessive numbers
of overseas workers.
Agricultural
projects in the Gulf and many Arab countries have not met with great success as
it is naturally difficult to raise crops in these hot, arid lands. When the
Saudis embarked on producing their own wheat they relied on the country’s
underground water reserves to irrigate the land. Such was the demand for water
that they overused the country’s aquifers and the project failed but, when they
could not grow wheat for bread, they turned to milk production and developed
huge dairy farms. However the dairy cows in these farms are fed copious amounts
of green fodder which naturally requires water to grow! Where does the water
for this production of fodder plants come from when the aquifers have been
depleted? Ironically the growing of green fodder needs much more water than
growing cereals. Is the water produced by desalination plants? If so it is
expensive fodder, but no doubt producing desalinated water for agriculture will
be subsidized by the government.
The Gulf States
started their agricultural development by relying on water from wells and there
was a flurry of well digging by foreign workers in order to provide water for
the farms that sprang up across the states. In addition the “farmers” of these
Gulf States relied on foreign agricultural workers and I was told of many cases
where the operation of pumps on well heads had been left to the whim of these
workers who took little care to ensure water was not wasted. Most of these
initial farming enterprises would prove to be no more than the “leisure
activities” of the wealthy and no thought was given to the amount of water
taken from the wells. I was in Qatar in the 1990s when the government proposed
putting meters on the wells to monitor water usage and avoid waste of the
precious commodity. However the proposal was met with such uproar from the land
owners that it was never enforced.
At the same time the
late Sheik Zaid of the United Arab Emirates, who wanted to see agricultural
development in his arid country, encouraged the production of local food using
underground water and foreign farm laborers. The main crop produced was
tomatoes and truckloads of local tomatoes would be driven to the Abu Dhabi
weighbridge where, depending on the weight of the truck’s cargo, large
subsidies would be granted to the producer. Once the subsidy had been allocated
the truck driver drove a short distance and dumped the load of unwanted
vegetables! This was brought to notice when one of my colleagues in F.A.O. was
sent to investigate a massive explosion of the fly population in Abu Dhabi only
to find that the flies were thriving on the mountains of unwanted, subsidized,
tomatoes, a crop that needs a lot of water to produce! The development of a
canning or tomato puree plant to use this tomato crop would have avoided the
fly problem and given some tangible result from the whole enterprise. However
no one had given thought to the entire project and the consequences were a
plague of flies and the waste of the country’s meager, irreplaceable,
underground water reserves. It has to be said that whoever advised the U.A.E. to
embark on this expensively, subsidized project decided to meet the wishes of
the state’s ruler and turn a blind eye to the obvious outcome of wasting the
limited water resources.
This story from Abu
Dhabi is not the only case where a food production idea, put forward by a
leader, political figure or prominent business man, was jumped at with no
thought to the environmental impact or consequences of the enterprise. All too
often the idea is grasped by those who are all too willing to please those in
power, then bilateral or UN development agencies are called in to assist in the
new project, and with blinkered eyes these specialists work to bring about the
desired outcome. In such cases the environmental consequences may far outweigh
any benefits of the venture not to mention the use of finances that could have
been used to greater benefit elsewhere.
In Kuwait FAO financially supported a Technical
Co-operation Programme, using funds that the donors regularly allocated to
poorer countries. The project was based on the allocation of several thousands
of small plots of land (recognized as smallholdings in Europe) to individuals
for the purpose of livestock production. This was supposed to help with the
country’s food security yet the majority of the animals kept by the owners of
the plots of land were exotic birds and animals with very few small ruminants
and camels. The result was a proliferation of what in effect were small
zoological collections kept by wealthy people and little was contributed
towards food production for the Kuwaiti population.
In Libya in the
early 70’s, at the insistence of Gaddafi, the ill-advised, Kufra agricultural
development took place in the south east of the country. In 1976 I was a member
of the organization committee of the Libya’s first veterinary conference in
Benghazi and I accompanied a very large group of foreign visitors who were
flown from Benghazi to Kufra to see the 250,000 sheep and the irrigated fields
that were producing cereals and vegetables by the use of underground water. The
desert had indeed become green and it was an unbelievable sight to see from the
plane as we flew over the desert that was spotted with large circles of green!
However the greening of the desert was short lived and a few years later the
shifting dunes of sand reclaimed the land as the quantity of the available
underground water had been grossly miscalculated. What a costly mistake!
The Alsarir project
was a similar enterprise to the north of Kufra where one of my colleague,
worked as part of a UN team and this suffered the same fate as Kufra. Following
the failure of these endeavors, Gaddafi, following the advice he was given and
determinate to secure water for drinking and food production, started to talk
about developing a great man-made river to bring water from the south of the
country to the more populated north. This project, costing US$ 25 billion, was
executed by Korean companies over several years and consisted of producing
1,300 wells to take water from a fossil aquifer and pump it, in especially
constructed pipes that were several metres in diameter, northwards. The
original estimation was that there was sufficient water in the aquifer to meet
the needs of Libya for thousands of years now that figure has been amended to
50 to 60 years and if the Libyan population and its demand for water continues
to increase at the present rate the country will have no alternative other than
to turn to the desalination of sea water to meet its needs. This is an
expensive alternative costing 10 times more that the man-made river – if these
estimates prove to be correct! In short Libya will spend all of its oil
revenues on desalinating water and importing its food. This would prove Gadaffi
to have been right when he repeatedly preached to the country, “If a nation
does not produce its own food it will be a slave to the others.” In the 10
years I spent in Libya I heard this almost every day on the state’s radio and
television.
The
situation in Kurdistan
I am concerned that
here in Kurdistan we are ignoring what happened in other countries of the
region while agriculture is not given any priority by the leading elite as they
are bedazzled by the newly acquired oil wealth. I had only been in the country
a few weeks when I was told by a leading politician, “Agriculture is not
important when we have oil!”, and sadly I have heard this view many times
since. Just as I have seen in many other oil producing countries the majority
of agricultural land in Kurdistan is now being used for other purposes. All too often agricultural land is now used
for “leisure activities” or the construction of villas surrounded by
several donums of land
with barbed wire fencing and the obligatory wells, and the latter may or may
not be legal.
An indication of how
serious the depletion of our agricultural production (and land) is can be found
on the KRG investment website which reveals how much land and money has been
‘invested’ in activities other than agriculture. Today the majority of people
are ‘after a fast buck’ and both the government and most of the population are
more interested in enterprises that offer a quick turnover while foreign
investors are attracted to Kurdistan to provide service industries. At the same
time we are faced with a surfeit of food and drink imports from the immediate
neighbouring countries which are upstream from us and control the amount of
water that flows into our lands. An indication of how little importance is
attributed to agriculture in Kurdistan is that only one of the 16 Ministers of
Agriculture appointed in the last 21 years (during separate or joint
administrations) has been an agriculturist while the Director Generals were
political appointees and only some of these had an agricultural background.
While the powers that
be are dismissing the agricultural sector as being of little significance
little attention is being paid to the continual reduction in the flow of rivers
and streams entering the country or the increasing demand placed on our
aquifers. The number of “authorized” wells in the KRG area at the end of 2012
stood at 18,000, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. More than half of
these wells were identified as being used to supply water for industries, yet
there is little evidence of industrial production. I have been informed by a
reliable source that at some of these wells one can purchase a small tanker of
water for 8 million ID and that this is the sole purpose of the well. In
addition many of the new villas and small holdings that are springing up all over
our countryside have their own well, with or without government approval. If
government officials try to stop the construction of a well a telephone call
from a member of the hierarchy will overturn any official decision, even at the
ministerial level as most of the officials are political appointees.
The lack of concern paid to the loss prime
agricultural land becomes less significant when compared to the unconcern over
the diminishing levels of water in the rivers flowing into the country. Turkey
and Iran are adamant that water in the rivers that flow across their borders
into Kurdistan is treated as a ‘commodity’. It seems that our governments
easily make trade agreements with our two neighbours to import all sorts of
goods, including food and drink, into Iraq yet, apart from raising a verbal
concern over the reduction of water in our rivers and aquifers, they have
failed to take the matter further. Meanwhile our neighbours are taking full
advantage of the weak Iraqi state and are making tens of billions of US $ from
exports to Iraq and Kurdistan. Even Syria, suffering from civil unrest for 3
years, still manages to export its products to us!
Importing goods from Syria at the present time is an indication of how
unconcerned we have become as to where our food comes from. Turkey, Iran and
Syria are profiting from exporting food to us so obviously we should use this
to our advantage in order to prevent them continuing to deprive us of water. No
doubt there are those who would query this idea stating that we are buying the
food that has been produced with the water we no longer receive but we are not
only being denied water that could be used in agriculture but very soon we will
not have enough for us all to drink!
NASA's warning about the Euphrates-Tigris River Basin.
In a paper
published in the Journal of Water Resources Research (February 2013)
researchers from NASA and others published their findings on the water
situation in the Tigris-Euphrates River basin. These researchers have provided
a disturbing figure for the total loss of fresh water from the basin from 2003
to 2009 of 144 billion m3. A few points must be taken into
consideration with this figure of total water loss. The researchers were
concerned with the water loss in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin and not the
water loss in a specific country. Therefore the 144 billion cubic meters of
water loss is from an area of 753,960Km2 covering the South West of
Iran, South East of Turkey, North West Syria and Northern and Central Iraq.The
total water loss is over 7 years from 2003-2009, and consists of 3 main parts, 20% was lost by evaporation in
the soil, 20% from lakes and reservoirs, 60% loss by the decline in the
groundwater where humans have pumped water from the ground (wells, boreholes)
for usage.
The
river Nile receives 55 billion cubic
meters annually and we can see that in 7 years the water loss in the Tigris
Euphrates basin is equivalent to three times the water in the Nile in any one
year!
The researchers highlighted several issues of MAJOR
concern to Iraq:
·
When
there is a water shortage, the rivers supply less water to Iraq, so that Iraq
relies on boreholes which then decrease the groundwater levels (this
groundwater can be considered non-renewable).
·
The
water loss is accelerating, especially after 2007.
·
The
areas with the greatest water loss and most likely to be affected in the future
are the areas furthest downstream i.e. Iraq (including South Iraq).
·
The
water loss is exasperated by poor local water management.
·
The
water loss is considerably exasperated by a lack of cooperation in water
management between the countries concerned.
·
Turkey’s
construction of dams means that Iraq therefore has less water supplied by the
rivers and must then rely even more on its depleting groundwater. This
situation will be exacerbated by any drought.
The lack of international
cooperation water management in the region is already affecting will the lives
of the people who depend on the waters of the Euphrates and Tigris.
The threat posed by Turkey’s
actions
The increasing utilization of
water from the Tigris and Euphrates by upstream countries is also of concern to
nations outside of the region. A roundtable meeting for delegates from the
nations concerned was organized by Blue Peace in the Houses of Parliament,
London in December 2012 and this was followed by another meeting in Istanbul,
in March 2013. I participated in both meetings but so far the only outcome has
been that delegates from outside the region are even more concerned over the
developing situation. Their concern was raised by Turkey’s representative
making it very clear that they regard water as a commodity that they can sell.
In addition they did not deny that they plan to sell agricultural land,
irrigated by the water from the 22 dams constructed so far under the Turkish Southeastern
Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, GAP)
project and those that they plan to construct, to other countries with limited
agricultural land such as the Gulf States.
The lake behind the Ataturk Dam
on the Euphrates alone is more than 40km3 in volume yet there has
been no significant discussion on management of the waters of the Tigris and
Euphrates that has involved leaders of the countries of the Tigris and
Euphrates. It appears that those outside the countries dependant on these
rivers for water recognize the severity of the consequences of Turkey’s actions
and are more concerned while, within Turkey itself, there have been protests
over the flooding of land and the forced relocation of thousands of Turkish
Kurds from their homes and villages and the loss of World Heritage sites.
Within Iraq the fall in river levels has had repercussions on water supplies
and a significant impact on the marshlands of the south.
Loss of rivers and streams
flowing across the border with Iran
In addition to Turkey’s depletion
of Iraq’s major rivers Iran has dammed more than 24 small rivers and streams
that also supply Kurdistan and Iraq. Some of these rivers have completely dried
up such as the Alwand removing the drinking water supply for almost 1.5 million
people. Photographs of the Alwand in full flow and as it now is, a dry road for
cars, were met with disbelief from members of the Blue Peace meeting in London
in 2012. Until then the impact on Kurdistan and Iraq of Iran’s utilisation of
water for irrigation had not been brought to public attention yet its actions are
having a great impact. Iran is using the water for irrigation producing crops
for its use and to export to its neighbor while we appear raise little
objection to deprivation of water from our once fertile lands and happily buy
Iran’s produce.
The views of KRG’s General Director of Water Resources
The General
Director of Water Resources, Kurdistan’s Ministry of Agriculture, has said that
drought, construction of legal and illegal wells and the demand for water
drinking and irrigation is having a major impact on Kurdistan’s underground
water reserves and they are rapidly depleting.
He
said that over the last 11 years the level of the underground water in some
areas has dropped by 100 meters. In order to reach underground water one has to
dig down 350m in Erbil and 250m in both Suliemaniah, and Duhok while 11 years
ago one could reach underground water at only a depth of 180m to 220m in Erbil,
90 to 150m in Suliemaniah and 150m in Duhok. The Director General said that
the depth at which water is
found is increasing at a dangerous rate. He further illustrated the problem by
saying that in the Mala Omar district of Erbil the level at which ground water
was found had increased by 18m but in the same area three years later the level
had dropped a further 45m. Similarly over the past three years in
Akre, and Halabja the underground water level has dropped 12m and 7m
respectively and that while water usage has increased the snow and rainfall
levels are decreasing annually.
In
addition the DG was especially concerned about the digging of wells, especially
illegally. He said there are 4,800, 7,828,
and 2,034 legal wells in Erbil, Suli and Duhok, respectively, but there are
also 2,000, 17,000 and 40 illegal wells in the three respective provinces. Most of these wells have been dug
with Syrian-made equipment that has been banned in Syria in order to preserve
that country’s underground water reserves. He has advised the government to
take steps to provide water for drinking and irrigation from the rivers
"…or one day the underground water will mix with other components and it
cannot be used… the wells will also get dry … then a disaster will
happen."