By 2005, with one in eight Ethiopians in need of international food relief, Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi was angrily protesting Egypt’s monopoly on large-scale Nile irrigation and threatening to unilaterally divert its waters for Ethiopia’s benefit. “While Egypt is taking the Nile water to transform the Sahara Desert into something green, we in Ethiopia—who are the source of 85% of that water—are denied the possibility of using it to feed ourselves,” he declared. “I think it is an open secret that the Egyptians have troops that are specialized in jungle warfare. Egypt is not known for its jungles…From time to time Egyptian presidents have threatened countries with military action if they move…If Egypt were to plan to stop Ethiopia from utilizing the Nile waters it would have to occupy Ethiopia and no country on Earth has done that in the past.” Ominously, Meles added, “The current regime cannot be sustained. It’s being sustained because of the diplomatic clout of Egypt. Now, there will come a time when the people of East Africa and Ethiopia will become too desperate to care about these diplomatic niceties. Then, they are going to act.”
It seems unrealistic that Egypt can long maintain its historical hegemony over the waters of the Nile at the expense of widespread poverty, malnutrition, humanitarian crises, and oppressive, dysfunctional government among a fast-growing population of several hundred million Africans upriver. Two of the most horrific genocides in recent times, in Rwanda and Sudan, occurred in Nile basin states. Burundi, like Ethiopia, is one of the three poorest nations in the world, and the Horn of Africa is a war-torn wreckage of failed states and recurring famine. The Nile is these nations’ greatest natural asset for development, too. Ethiopia, for instance, has unlocked a mere 3 percent of its hydropower potential. Often heralded as the future breadbasket of Africa, and encompassing over three-fifths of the Nile basin, Sudan is irrigating only 1 percent of its arable land. It defied history that, pressured by dire necessities, Egypt’s neighbors wouldn’t eventually find means among today’s ample global resources to utilize more of the Nile’s waters for themselves, with or without Egypt’s assent. It is a recurring pattern that civilizations born downstream in the fertile deltas and flooding river valleys saw political power eventually gravitate upstream toward those in the best tactical position to control the river’s flow.
In the age of water scarcity, moreover, Egypt’s traditional strategy seems shortsightedly disconnected from the new politics of water. It remains rooted in the historical time warp that it could extract an ever greater usable supply of the Nile through continued political dominance on the one hand, and by implementing grandiose engineering schemes for irrigation and new cities on the other. At the same time, its aversion to politically difficult domestic reforms promoting more-efficient use of existing water perpetuates wasteful water practices at a time of growing scarcity. Nile water continues to be given away to irrigation farmers at heavily subsidized prices, amounting to some $5 to $10 billion per year, encouraging profligate flood irrigation techniques that ruinously waterlog valuable cropland. “Among the pervasive beliefs in Egyptian culture is that water, like air, is God-given and free,” explains Nile scholar Robert Collins. “Any pricing system and controls on its use are totally unacceptable and almost blasphemous.”
Inexorably, Egypt’s day of water reckoning is drawing nearer. Its dependence on foreign grain imports—providing up to two-fifths of Egyptians’ daily bread—to make up for its freshwater deficit is growing. Simultaneously, the deleterious, long-term environmental impacts of the Aswan Dam are impinging with escalating force. With the river’s fertilizing silt being entrapped and building up at the dam, Egypt’s farmland is suffering the depletions common to intensively irrigated cropland everywhere. Soil salinization and waterlogging are eroding farm productivity throughout the delta and the Nile Valley. Without the natural silt buffer brought by the predammed river, Mediterranean seawater has intruded as far as 30 miles inland. The fertile delta, home to over 30 million Egyptians and comprising two-thirds of Egypt’s agricultural area, is shrinking. The precipitous decline in annual water volume reaching the Mediterranean Sea from 32 to only 2 billion cubic meters following the Aswan Dam’s erection is depriving the coastal and marshland fisheries of replenishing nutrients and gradually destroying much of Egypt’s once-thriving sardine and shrimp fisheries. The reliance on massive amounts of chemical fertilizers is also exacting a heavy toll in both the Aswan hydroelectricity consumed in its production and from the pollution of the Nile and delta lagoons. Thanks to fertilizer discharge, water hyacinth blooms choke irrigation canals, while infestations of the snail carrying schistosomiasis, the debilitating liver and intestinal disease, has been spreading.
In short, the full cost accounting is just coming due on Nasser and Egypt’s fateful mid-twentieth-century decision to submerge forever the Nile’s unique identity as world history’s only self-sustaining major irrigation system behind the iconic, pyramid-like giant dam in the hot deserts at Aswan. At 75 million people and adding more than a million more each year, Egypt is dangerously outstripping the current productive limits of Aswan and the Nile. A second scissors blade, meanwhile, is closing on Egypt from the swelling demand for Nile water from the population boom going on throughout the Nile basin. In 2006 Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan had a combined population of 192 million; they are projected to add nearly 50 percent to reach 275 million by 2025. When all the Nile basin countries are counted, some half a billion people—overwhelmingly young, poor, and bred amid continuous violence—will be struggling to live off the waters of the Nile.
The prognosis darkened further when other related problems of global water scarcity are added to the picture: World food prices, which hit record highs in early 2008, are likely to climb higher in coming years from the 50 percent increase in world population, rising middle class demand for animal protein in China and India, and even possibly from tapering supply if America continues its early rush to corn ethanol biofuels as a gasoline substitute. At the bottom of the food chain are the water indigent, who spend most of the family budget on food and simply have no margin to absorb the higher cost of their daily bread. Climate change forecasts, if they come to pass, add to the potential for cataclysm. Models predict that Nile flows might decline up to 25 percent from altered precipitation and evaporation patterns, while rising sea levels could inundate large tracts of Egyptian delta farmland.
In early 2008, Egypt experienced a possible foretaste of its future when 11 people died in violence linked to lengthening bread lines caused by shortages of the government subsidized, traditional flat round loaves costing one cent (five piastres) arising from the combination of record grain prices and endemic official corruption. Mindful that bread riots could topple governments, President Mubarak called in the army to bake and distribute additional loaves.
In short, Egypt and its basin neighbors are sitting atop a growing demographic and hydrological time bomb, with Nile water scarcity as its detonating fuse. Like many nations facing world water famine, Egypt seems to have but one rational policy response: expand its existing water supply through aggressive efficiency improvements at home, cooperate with fellow basin nations to maximize the absolute volume that can be sustainably extracted from the river, and restructure its economy around the reality of its long-term reliance on the integrated global trading system to import its water-intensive necessities, such as food, until the day when an innovative breakthrough might bring its water resources and population levels into sustainable balance.
It is hard to overstate the immensity of Egypt’s political and cultural challenge. Fully embracing such a cooperative approach to the Nile means surrendering its proud self-image as the downriver hegemon that has been ingrained in its national psyche over many millennia. As a thought experiment, it is the symbolic equivalent of Egypt agreeing to tear down the Aswan Dam, and to put its fate as a nation on the goodwill, political reliability, and growth of upriver neighbors with a long history of mutual suspicions and occasional wars, domestic instability, impov
erishment, and humanitarian tragedies. This is not a vision that any leader of any nation is likely to embrace welcomingly.
Nevertheless, by the latter part of the first decade of the 2000s, the political economic landscape began to tilt against Egypt. Sudan is planning to erect new dams on the Nile with Chinese assistance. Both Ethiopia and Sudan have begun leasing prospective farmland to grow crops for dry, hungry, rich foreign nations such as Saudi Arabia. Other basin states are launching unilateral projects. A proliferating number of small, earthen dams 10 feet high being built by local Ethiopian and Sudanese farmers on tributaries of the Nile are siphoning a growing volume of Nile water—totaling 3 to 4 percent of the flow at Aswan by the mid-1990s—before it reaches the river’s main stem. Ethiopia’s diplomatic leverage increased with the discovery of a previously unknown aquifer stocked by Blue Nile runoff that could be pumped for irrigation and the sense that it could outwait an increasingly desperate Egypt for better concessions on the Nile. Against this background Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan, with other Nile basin countries, launched a more vigorous new series of meetings to try to reach a comprehensive accord on joint basin investment and development. Throughout the world, nations sharing international waterways have been forming cooperative basin initiatives in response to water scarcity. The Nile Basin Initiative was less advanced than many, and faced challenges graver than most, but offered large potential rewards for all. For the first time, the Egyptians are showing a genuine, pragmatic willingness to seriously entertain, with international monitoring and financing, significant dam storage volumes in the low evaporation rate highlands of Ethiopia. Indeed, through reduced flood loss from dam control, basin experts calculate that Ethiopia will actually be able to provide all the irrigation water envisioned in its own master plan, create much additional hydroelectricity, and still release greater amounts of water downstream to Sudan and Egypt than it does presently. By recouping much of the amounts lost to evaporation in the equatorial Sudd swamps through completion of the long-sidetracked canal, a Nile Basin Agreement, if realized, could yield an extra 10 billion cubic meters or more from the river. Throughout the basin, irrigated food production and hydroelectric generation could expand enormously, the Nile ecosystem become better managed, and, possibly, a cooperative regional sense of shared difficulty rather than competitive enmity could gradually begin to take hold. All the world has a vested interest in helping Egypt and its neighbors muddle through, since any political upheaval in Egypt is likely to transmit instability throughout the water-starved, volatile Middle East and North Africa.
Water had already helped spark an actual hot war in the smallest and driest of the ancient Fertile Crescent cradles of civilization, the Jordan River basin. In one of the world’s political hot spots, Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, and Syrians contest to control and divide the scarce resources of a region that long ago ran out of enough freshwater for everyone. By 2000, people living in the heart of the basin were withdrawing 3.2 billion cubic meters of water, well in excess of the 2.5 billion cubic meters that recharged each year by natural rainfall. The tiny Jordan River, only 4 percent the size of the Nile, is routinely reduced to a mere trickle south of the freshwater Sea of Galilee, failing to replenish the ever saltier and shrinking Dead Sea into which it empties. Much of the shortfall has been met by overpumping groundwater from the region’s main aquifer systems—three on Palestinian lands in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and one in coastal Israel. In all, the more than 12 million inhabitants of the Jordan basin have only one-third as much freshwater as needed for food self-sufficiency; regional stability, therefore, depends upon an uninterrupted flow of virtual water in the form of food imports.
At the time of Israel’s creation in 1948, there was enough freshwater for all the Jordan basin’s peoples. Shortages started in the 1950s with the doubling of water consumption as Israel’s arid landscape was transformed into irrigated cropland by kibbutzim and individual farmers. To head off impending water conflicts, America’s Eisenhower administration in the early 1950s sent a special ambassador, Eric Johnston, to try to negotiate a Tennessee Valley Authority–type water-sharing accord that would improve economic, social, and environmental conditions for all basin residents. Remarkably, Johnston forged an agreement among all the representative water professionals. But political polarization, and rising Arab nationalism on the eve of the 1956 Suez Crisis, intervened to doom the landmark water accord when Arab ministers meeting in October 1955 rejected it.
The shortages of the 1950s erupted into violent conflicts in the 1960s. At the start of the decade, Israeli foreign minister Golda Meir had put Israel’s Arab neighbors on notice that Israel would regard any effort to divert the northern tributaries of the Jordan River as a vital attack upon Israel itself. When Israel in 1964 built a large pumping station near the Sea of Galilee and began conveying water into its new National Water Carrier network toward coastal Tel Aviv and farms in the southerly Negev Desert, a summit meeting of Arab leaders resolved to stop it. Work began on a mostly Saudi-financed dam in Syria. When Israel responded with its own diversion scheme, Syrians fired upon Israeli works crews. Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization’s Fatah guerrillas got their baptism with a failed New Year’s Day 1965 attack on the water carrier. The cross-border fire culminated in an Israeli tank and aircraft assault that terminated Syria’s diversion project and a decision by Arab states to dismantle a dam site on the Yarmuk River. Although a full-blown water war was averted, it added fuel to an escalating chain reaction of violence, which Israeli commander and later prime minister Ariel Sharon called the trigger to the June 1967 war: “In reality, the Six Day War started two and a half years earlier on the day Israel decided to act against the diversion of the Jordan,” he wrote. “While the border disputes between Syria and ourselves were of great significance, the matter of water diversion was a stark issue of life and death.”
The fateful 1967 war started with Nasser’s expulsion in mid-May of the U.N.’s Suez Crisis era buffer force and Egypt’s ensuing reblockade of Israel’s only shipping route to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. With united Arab military forces amassing on every Israeli frontier, and Arab popular opinion openly rejoicing at the prospect of Israel’s anticipated destruction, Israeli leaders launched a secret first strike on the morning of June 5. While ground forces burst through the Egyptian border into Gaza and Sinai en route to the Suez Canal, Israel’s entire small air force, leaving Israel undefended, deployed stealthily for the air bases housing the Arabs’ much larger force of Egyptian-led warplanes. Within hours, following furious bombing and antiaircraft fire, the core of the Arab air force lay smoldering in ruins without ever having gotten off the ground. Over the next few days of fighting, Jordanian troops were driven out of the entire West Bank and surrendered the Old City of Jerusalem. Syrian tanks were beaten back up the slopes of the sparsely populated Golan Heights, which they soon abandoned in flight for Damascus.
The stunning results of the Six-Day War transformed the geopolitics of the Middle East. Israel’s territorial extent suddenly quadrupled. Of equal significance, but less public notice, the hydrological balance of power between Israel and her neighbors also shifted decisively. Before the war, Israel had controlled less than 10 percent of the Jordan watershed. After the war, it was the basin’s dominant water power. Coming under Israel’s total control were the West Bank’s underground aquifers, including the large, western aquifer that runs north-south along the foothills near the Green Line and flows west toward Israel and the Mediterranean Sea while recharging primarily on the occupied Palestinian territories. By the early 2000s, the West Bank aquifers were supplying one-third of Israel’s freshwater. Of even greater strategic importance, the Golan Heights, annexed in 1981, gave Israel geographic possession of a vital catchment for its renewable Sea of Galilee, the source of another third of Israel’s water. The Golan also gave greater security over more headwaters and sources of the Upper Jordan River, as well as frontage on the Yarmuk River that fed the Jord
an south of Galilee, and was historically famous as the site of the 636 Muslim victory over the entrapped Byzantine army that opened the floodgates of the Levant and Egypt to Islam’s early military juggernaut. The conviction that Israel is stealing Arab water that must be recovered has become another of the inflammatory passions and potential hair triggers in the dangerous Arab-Israeli tensions.
Israel exploited its sudden new water bounty to fuel a round of economic growth and modernization. In 1982 it integrated the West Bank’s water supplies into its National Water Carrier network. At the same time, it used water as a national political tool by doling it out in disproportionately small drops to West Bank Palestinians through severe restrictions on drilling new or deepening existing wells. In one of the world’s starkest Water Have–Have-Not divides, as a result, Palestinians typically had only one-quarter as much water as the Israeli settlers living alongside them. Irrigated Palestinian farmland on the West Bank shrank drastically—from one-quarter to one-twentieth of cropland—as a result. Palestinians were forced to bathe and wash less frequently than their settler neighbors, many of whom enjoyed lawns and swimming pools, while many Palestinians suffered the further burden of having to pay a stiff premium for tanker-transported water to meet their basic drinking, cooking, and hygiene needs; in the villages around Nablus, for instance, some families had to pay as much as 20 to 40 percent of their income for water. On the coast, Israeli dams on the Wadi Gaza diverted for Israeli farms the main recharging source of the shallow and badly overdrawn aquifer that was the sole natural supply of the Palestinian Gaza Strip. Depletion of the Gaza Aquifer grew so bad that that seawater and sewage easily infiltrated, leaving some 1.4 million Gaza Palestinians to drink contaminated water that was often literally sickening and an epidemic health hazard. Water famine and rage over “stolen” Arab water even exacerbated the 1987 intifada, which first erupted in Gaza before spreading across the West Bank.
Steven Solomon Page 45
