The Red Sea - Dead Sea canal

The agreement for the two seas Canal connecting the Red and Dead Sea was summed up best by Israeli water minister Silvan Shalam who jubilantly described it following the December 9 signing ceremony at the World Bank headquarters as "a historic agreement that realises ... the dream of (founder of modern Zionism Theodore) Herzl."

The canal was another strategic triumph for Israel's conniving diplomacy even after the project was reduced to about one-tenth of its original size due to serious economic and environmental concerns raised by the World Bank.

The Zionist-envisioned project was repackaged and sponsored by Jordan as a must to save the Dead Sea, and building a large desalination plant providing each Israel and Jordan with eight billion to 13 billion gallons of fresh water annually.

According to Israeli and international environmentalists, Israeli government's policies of over pumping from the Sea of Galilee and Jordan River - serving Jewish only colonies - was the main cause for the loss of nearly 30 per cents of the Dead Sea's mass in the last 50 years.

Herzl's repackaged vision includes articles tacitly granting Israel exclusive water rights in the supposedly shared Sea of Galilee and Jordan River's water. For the tri-party agreement empowers Israel to transfer close to 13 billion gallons of fresh water from those bodies to Jordan and to sell the state of Palestine 8bn gallons of drinking water at preferential prices.

Even more cynical is for the state of Palestine to purchase water from Israel -mind you at a special discount - while Israel continues to expropriate West Bank's water aquifers for the benefit of illegal Jewish-only colonies for free.

In addition to political concerns, environmentalists have warned that introducing new water composition from the Red sea brings a host of new invasive photosynthetic organisms which could lead to drastic negative consequences affecting the unique natural system of the Dead Sea.

Unlikely to solve the Dead Sea environmental degradation, international and Israeli environmentalists have alternatively suggested that "the reestablishment of the Jordan River to its natural state was a better solution to the decline of the Dead Sea than the proposed canal."

While it would receive roughly half of the desalinated water from the project, the 100 miles brine pipeline will run exclusively through Jordanian territories to circumvent objections by Israeli environmental groups.

Lacking proper environmental oversight, a credible rupture in the high saline pipeline - running along known active earthquake fault - would cause irreparable damage for a main source of Jordan's fresh groundwater in Wadi Araba.

Being the only party with positive return and no potential risks, the agreement provides Israel a free safety net to escape responsibility for the Dead Sea's environmental calamity while realising an old Zionist strategic military vision adding a natural water course on Israel's eastern borders. Economically, this project places Israeli water companies in a unique position to gain the most in building the waterway, associated desalination and power generation plants.

Jordan, on the other hand, is taking the biggest long term risk since a probable structural failure in the Canal system would lead to an incurable disaster for both the agriculture and ecosystem in the Jordanian valley.

In purchasing Israeli water, Palestine is sanctioning Israel's theft of its water aquifers from occupied West Bank, while allowing Israel to continue syphoning the only lifeline for the Dead Sea. More

 

Drought Called a Factor in Syria’s Uprising

Two-and-a-half years ago, a group of children in the Syrian city of Dara’a triggered one of the bloodiest conflicts in the 21^st century when they painted some anti-government graffiti on a school wall in the ancient farming community.

The children were quickly detained and tortured, leading to widespread protests in the city that were met with harsh repression. The government’s brutal response led to a nationwide revolt that has now stagnated into a bloody stalemate with no end in sight. Dara’a is a mostly agricultural community in a region that has suffered an unrelenting drought since 2001.

Some experts say it’s no accident that Syria’s civil war began there. In 2009, the United Nations and other international agencies found that more than 800,000 Syrian farmers and herdsmen had been forced off their lands because of drought, with many crowding into cities like Dara’a. Additionally, thousands of illegal wells were drilled, drastically lowering the nation’s ground water supply.

The effects of drought and water-mismanagement in the region were highlighted recently by the publication of U.S. National Aeronautic and Space Administration satellite photographs of Syria, Turkey and Iraq. Faced with drought, Syrians crowding these farm towns started drilling deeper for fresh water in the aquifer beneath them. Experts estimated that 60 percent of the aquifer has been lost due to illegal drilling, and a total of 177 million-acre feet of water disappeared, the second-largest aquifer loss in the world.

Satellite images reveal depth of drought

“I actually don’t think the aquifer will recover,” said , a hydrologist and leader of a study of seven years of NASA satellite data that show the Tigris-Euphrates region second only to India in the speed of its groundwater loss. “The Middle East is the dry part of the world and now that climate change is expressing itself very clearly, one of the things that we will see is that the dry parts of the world will get drier,” Famiglietti said. “Think of it as a persistent prolonged drought.” Because of climate change, the Tigris-Euphrates basin and the underground reservoirs of fresh water that once nurtured this fragile desert climate may not be able to sustain future populations in Syria.

It all started in Dara’a

The Syrian uprising was unlike political uprisings in Egypt, Yemen and other Middle East states, all of which started in the major cities. Dara’a was a regional agricultural hub with a pre-war population of 90,000. “Dara’a is the capital of an agricultural province, one of the most significant agricultural areas,” said Syria scholar Ayel Zisser of the Tel Aviv University. Their protests spread from Dara’s at Syria’s southern border to communities north of Aleppo and across the vast al-Jazira plain that stretches from the banks of the Euphrates to the banks of the Tigris. The pattern of the protests followed the rural path of the drought. “Even until today it’s been a peasant revolt isolated to the rural areas,” Zisser said. Assad’s economic reforms focused on global trade that benefitted the urban middle classes, thereby worsening the plight of Syria’s farmers, according to Zisser. The reforms were implemented “at the expense of the population in the rural areas, where they abolished agricultural subsidies,” Zisser said. “The regime turned its back to the rural population and the result was the revolt.” Like other Middle Eastern countries, Syria’s population has increased dramatically in recent years. “This is the first time in history that in less than 30 years, the Middle East doubled its population. It was between 1950 and 1980,” said Arnon Soffer, a demographer and the head of research at the University of Haifa and Israel’s National Defense College. “If that’s not tragic enough, from 1980 to 2010 – another 30 years – this crazy area doubled itself again,” Soffer added. Even before climate change threatened less rainfall in the region, water was a hot-button issue. In 1973, Iraq rushed troops to Syria’s eastern border as upstream, Syria began filling its Tagba Dam with Euphrates water to create Lake Assad.

The real water power in basin is Turkey.

Syria and Iraq depend on the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris, which flow from southern Turkey, for most of their agricultural irrigation. Farmers on both sides of the border also rely on traditional irrigation techniques that waste water resources. “Turks use most of the water of the Euphrates,” said Bogochan Benli, a water expert who worked in the Aleppo labs of the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas during the years of the drought. Aleppo and many northern Syrian communities traditionally also depended on the Euphrates for their drinking water, he said. In Turkey, Benli said since the 1970’s the Southeastern Anatolia project has created employment for a poor and arid region of Turkey. It’s the main income-generator for the region and their water policy “will never change.” The project is an ambitious development of 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants to irrigate and provide electrical power in nine Turkish provinces. The centerpiece is the massive Ataturk Dam and hydroelectric power plant that opened in 1990. According Arnon Soffer of Haifa University a few months before the dam was completed, then-Turkish president Turgut Ozal told Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, “Now you can wash yourself for the next two months, but I will close the Ataturk Dam and I will dry the Euphrates River.” He said Ozal’s abrupt pronouncement to Hafez Assad was devastating to Syria. “The Euphrates became a wadi, a dry valley,” said Soffer. Assad Dam closed for a month. “The dam was empty and there was no electricity. Even up to today, I could not imagine how they could recover.” Though Turkey and its downstream neighbors have discussed sharing their waters, Turkey has not signed away any rights. With little or no regional cooperation on water issues, experts fear that the turmoil now wrecking Syria could be a prelude to other conflicts in the region. More

While there is still no regional conflict in the region there is a compelling need for an international organization to start a regional conversation on trans-boundary rivers. Rivers, although they may, as in this case originate in Turkey, are a critical element of the global commons, and must be fairly shared by all riverine states. We are no longer in colonial times where for instance Egypt got the lions share of the Nile, leaving very little for Ethiopia. Syria is already in turmoil, Turkey is simmering with protests, Jordan is being blown to and froe and Israel may go off on a tangent at any time. Let us therefore address this issue immediately.

 

Jordan’s Crippled Water Resources Protected by Security

Jordan is dealing with an increase in water theft. Ironically, as I type, I am awaiting a water truck arrival to refill our new apartment’s tank: I’d jumped in the shower, turned the knobs, and was met with – nothing. Landlord says it’s been three weeks since the city pumped water to the roof tanks, and the situation seems to be city-wide.

Now it makes sense why people would be breaking into the system. Mark my words, water is the new oil.

Representatives of the Ministry of Water and Irrigation, the Ministry of Interior and the Public Security Department (PSD) met last week to address the rising number of violations on water wells and pipelines. The water protection campaign was announced soon afterwards: start date unspecified due to security reasons.

Omar Salameh, speaking on behalf of the Ministry of Water and Irrigation, said the operation is directed at areas most vulnerable to theft of water and equipment: the Jordan Valley, south Amman, Mafraq and Zarqa.

“We are providing the PSD with a list of locations that require protection, either because of their importance or because they witness recurring theft and vandalism,” Salameh told The Jordan Times. “Scores of water resources from which around 1,870 cubic meters of water were pumped per hour remain shut down because of violations and theft,” he added.

“We will provide the police directorates with the list of locations that need protection and the names of suspected violators. The PSD will also coordinate with district governors to end violations,” said PSD spokesperson Lt. Col. Mohammad Khatib.

The Ministry will conduct a concurrent media campaign to raise public awareness about the impact of water violations on individuals.

Violations to the water network deprive people of their fair water share and magnifies the nation’s water crisis.

Minister of Water and Irrigation Mohammad Najjar told the media last month that theft and vandalism of water resources were dramatically rising, threatening an adequate public supply of clean water.

This year, by mid-May, that ministry recorded 28 violations on the Kingdom’s main water network, causing remedial actions exceeding $200,000. Pumping has been suspended at 50 points in the network until $600,000 in additional repair funds can be identified.

As comparison, there were 50 acts of vandalism recorded in 2011; and 52 registered in 2010. At this rate, Najjar anticipates 2012 repair costs to fall between $1.4 an $1.6 MIL.

Constant reinvestment in water infrastructure and associated environmental mitigation is money down the drain, but the real losses are in actual potable water supply. Mostly semi-arid Jordan is characterized bysevere water scarcity, receiving less than two feet of rainfall per year in most areas. The country shares its major surface water resources with Syria and Israel: its share from the Yarmouk and Jordan Rivers is a comparative trickle. Groundwater resources are over exploited and aquifers are vulnerable to contamination.

Jordan should be looking into water harvesting and storage methods such as those used in the country thousands of years ago. In the heart of the capital of Amman at the Jabal al-Qal'a one can see cistern dating back to the Roman occupation. Other examples can be found in Jerash and Petra. See photos left and below. Editor

 

 

Climate Change and Water Security

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released alarming data on the consequences of global warming in some of the world’s poorest regions. By 2100, one billion to three billion people worldwide are expected to suffer from water scarcity. Global warming will increase evaporation and severely reduce rainfalls – by up to 20% in the Middle East and North Africa – with the amount of water available per person possibly halved by mid-century in these regions.

This sudden scarcity of an element whose symbolic and spiritual importance matches its centrality to human life will cause stress and exacerbate conflicts worldwide. Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia will be the first to be exposed. The repercussions, however, will be global.

Yet this bleak picture is neither an excuse for apathy nor grounds for pessimism. Conflicts may be inevitable; wars are not. Our ability to prevent “water wars” will depend on our collective capacity to anticipate tensions, and to find the technical and institutional solutions to manage emerging conflicts. The good news is that such solutions exist, and are proving their efficacy everyday.

Dams – provided they are adequately sized and designed – can contribute to human development by fighting climate change and regulating water supply. Yet in a new context of scarcity, upstream infrastructure projects on international rivers may impact water quality or availability for neighboring states, thus causing tensions.

River basin organizations such as that established for the Nile, Niger, or Senegal rivers help facilitate dialogue between states that share hydraulic resources. By developing a joint vision for the development of international waterways, these regional cooperation initiatives work towards common ownership of the resource, thereby reducing the risk that disputes over water use will escalate into violence.

Most international waterways have such frameworks for dialogue, albeit at different stages of development and levels of achievement. If we are to take climate change predictions seriously, the international community should strengthen these initiatives. Where they do not exist, they should be created in partnership with all the countries concerned. Official development assistance can create incentives to cooperate by financing data-collection, providing technical know-how, or, indeed, by conditioning loans on constructive negotiations.

Yet international water conflicts are only one side of the coin. The most violent water wars take place today within rather than among states. A dearth of water fuels ethnic strife, as communities begin to fear for their survival and seek to capture the resource. In Darfur, recurrent drought has poisoned relations between farmers and nomadic herdsmen, and the war we are helplessly witnessing today follows years of escalating conflict. Chad risks falling prey to the same cycle of violence. More

 

Water for all: The case for a one-state solution

 Kuwait City, Kuwait - In light of yet another round of negotiations between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israeli negotiators (which, it must be said, took place on the heels of an announcement to build more illegal homes in East Jerusalem), questioning the likelihood of negotiations ever resulting in an independent and fully sovereign Palestinian state along the pre-1967 borders is as pressing as ever.

When Prime Minister Netanyahu, during his public scolding of President Obama, referred to the pre-1967 borders as"indefensible" for Israel, he was not expressing a fringe, radical point of view, but rather, frankly articulating what many in Israel's policymaking circles had implicitly recognised decades ago; that a completely sovereign Palestinian state within said borders, in complete control of the natural resources to which it would be entitled, is an unacceptable option.

Some, such as the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations that inhabit the illegal Jewish colonies in the West Bank, or the Christian evangelicals in the United States, endorse this view on a religious basis. However, much more strategic and practical considerations such as the issue of water also make the 1967 borders "indefensible". It is on this basis - the basis that Israel cannot accept a sovereign Palestinian state rightfully in control of its water resources - that I argue the need for a paradigm shift in mainstream Palestinian discourse from a two-state solution to a one-state solution. More

 

World Water: Get the facts

Get the Facts

• According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 1.7 billion people still lack access to clean water. 2.3 billion people suffer from water-borne diseases each year.
  
• While the demand for water is on the rise, the supply is shrinking. Water-intensive agriculture, population growth, industrial pollution, breakneck development and other ecological threats are depleting freshwater supplies.
  
• The World Bank and other dominant international financial institutions condition their loans on privatization and increased cost recovery – which often requires charging water fees from those who make less than $2 per day.
  
• The result of privatization in numerous countries has been disastrous – less access to water for the poor, extremely high tariffs, and poor water quality.

Food & Water Watch works with coalition partners in communities around the world that are facing the privatization of water. Our goal is to defend water as a public resource, to ensure access to safe and affordable water, to help to build a strong coalition against privatization, and to promote the recognition of the right to water internationally. More

EU launches €1.5m project to improve water availability in West Bank

JERUSALEM, December 14, 2011 (WAFA) - The European Union (EU) launched a €1.5 million project to improve the livelihoods and food security levels of poor rural families through improving the availability and management of water for agricultural purposes, an EU press release said Wednesday.

The project is implemented by Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) and is expected to be finalized at the end of 2012. 

Availability of and access to water is one of the biggest problems Palestinian farmers and herders face, said the statement.

Since 2007, the region has suffered from severe weather conditions and rainwater scarcity affecting agricultural productivity. In addition, constraints in accessing land and restrictions imposed on Palestinians for establishing or rehabilitating water wells have severely impaired farmers from realizing their potential.

The project will construct and rehabilitate 450 rain feed water cisterns, which will secure access to water for irrigation of crops, home gardens and livestock to 450 farming families in the West Bank and will offer them a feasible and affordable way to improve their livelihood.

'There is an unquestionable need for a comprehensive response to water scarcity and difficulties in accessing water for Palestinian farmers. This project comes in addition to the EU food security program which has focused exactly on improving the management of water and wastewater in rural areas of the occupied territories to tackle these problems,' said the acting EU representative, John Gatt-Rutter. More

This initiative needs to also incorporate stopping of illegal extraction of water from Palestinian aquifers. Editor