Steven Solomon
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While the risk of water war in this thirstiest and most politically combustible of regions is high, it is by no means inevitable. The existential threat posed by water scarcity is so palpable that it generates opposing cooperative instincts for mutual survival as well. At the worst moments of the second Palestinian intifada, while Israel’s hegemony over West Bank water was being vehemently decried by angry stone throwers, Palestinian and Israeli officials continued to meet quietly and agreed not to damage each other’s waterworks. As a religion of the desert, Islam accords water a special esteem that also favors cooperation. All inhabitants in the starkly arid land share an intuitive appreciation of the Turkish proverb: “When one man drinks while another can only watch, doomsday follows.” In what might be considered a corollary of the mutually assured destruction doctrine that helped avert direct military conflict in the postwar nuclear age, it is possible that with rare statesmanship and sufficient desperation, a Middle Eastern water famine might lead inexorably not to devastating warfare but to a cooperative model of water détente that helps forge regional peace. It would be ironic, but not impossible, if salvation from the worsening regional water crisis came about through a resurrection of the faded dream of a marriage between state-of-the-art Israeli agricultural know-how and Arab oil investment.
Meanwhile yet another water shock with the potential to unsettle regional and international balances of power lurks in the torrid, sandy expanse of the Saudi Arabian desert. Geology played a cruel trick on the Saudi kingdom: While blessing it with the world’s largest oil reserves, its natural endowment of freshwater is among the planet’s most meager. Therefore, its future depends much on how effectively it converts its short-term abundance of oil into a sufficient, sustainable, long-term supply of freshwater. The Saudi landscape holds neither lakes nor rivers. For centuries, almost all its water came from underground—a shallow aquifer that was easily tapped by wells or at oases that recharged with rainfall and was able to support only a modest population at subsistence level. But much farther beneath the surface, about one-quarter of a mile deep, lay other, sizable, nonrenewable fossil aquifers—one-sixth as large America’s Midwest Ogallala—containing pristine water from up to 30,000 years ago that had trickled down over bygone ages when the surface climate was wetter.
The oil boom and drilling technology of the 1970s made Arabia’s fossil aquifers largely accessible for the first time. Instead of using its new treasure of ancient water prudently, Saudi monarchs went on a water binge as profligate as the industrial West’s burning through its oil. They mined it from deep beneath the ground as fast as they could. A spare, arid culture became awash with decorative fountains, modern plumbing, and lush golf courses overnight. Fearing retaliatory Western grain export restrictions in response to their OPEC cartel’s 1973 oil embargo, Saudi monarchs sought to achieve food independence by subsidizing the saturation of the desert with free groundwater until it bloomed with grain. In one of economic history’s most extravagantly subsidized and hopelessly uneconomic enterprises, the Saudis not only attained self-sufficiency in desert wheat, but from the mid-1980s became one of the world’s leading grain exporters. The production costs, however, were staggering—five times greater than the selling price of grain on international markets.
An even more punishing cost was the rapid depletion of the nonrenewable, precious aquifers themselves. Surveys in the 1980s estimated that Saudi Arabia had 400 million acre-feet of groundwater reserves–about thirty years’ annual flow of the Colorado River. But by pumping out nearly the equivalent of one Colorado River per year—eight times greater than the volume of renewable water recharge—the Saudis had exhausted about 60 percent of the accessible aquifers by 2005. The pace of depletion was slowed, but not arrested, from the 1990s by the chopping of subsidies that slashed wheat production by 70 percent from the peak in 1992.
Another means of converting Saudi oil into water is to desalinate water from the peninsula’s surrounding seas. Yet even with virtually costless oil energy to power desalinization plants on its eastern coast, Saudi production of renewable, desalinized water has been able to substitute for only a fraction of the natural fossil water used by its 25 million people. Early in the twenty-first century, fossil water is still providing half the domestic water for Saudi cities and over 70 percent of the huge volumes consumed by agriculture.
Belatedly, the Saudi monarchy formed a Ministry of Water and began to preach water efficiency. To symbolize its national goal of reducing domestic consumption by half, the de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, in 2004 replaced the palace’s extravagant 10-quart toilets with six-quart models. But it was too little, too late. The reforms lacked strong price incentives or commanding enforcement. Saudi farmers went on planting water thirsty alfalfa, which consumes four times as much water as wheat, as feed for the cattle that satiated the nation’s new appetite for dairy products. In the cities, little water is being recycled. Two-thirds of all dwellings are unconnected to sewage treatment plants so that raw sewage pollution is seeping into shallow groundwater, compounding the nation’s scarcity crisis. In effect, Saudi Arabia is squandering its one-time opportunity to use its nature-endowed fossil reservoir to restructure its water use and management patterns.
Instead, like so many other water impoverished countries, its fate depends much upon the deliverance from an as yet unforeseeable breakthrough in desalinization or another momentous water technology. By as soon as 2025, the Arabian aquifers may be scraping bottom. In the short run, Saudi Arabia can mitigate the dire impacts by continuing to desalinate with profits from its natural supply of oil for its most indispensable uses and to spend its petrodollar surpluses on importing virtual water as food. Indeed, it was already using some of its oil wealth to buy or lease farmland in nearby Sunni Islamic nations like Sudan and Pakistan, as well as in multireligious Ethiopia just across the Red Sea, in a bid to secure a reliable, future foreign source of food. But reliance on imported food, especially from unstable states dependant on water from their own overstaxed river basins, is a highly uncertain proposition, and slowly consumes the Kingdom’s treasury during what looks likely to be the beginning of the end of the golden age of oil. Eventually, its oil reserves will sputter out, too—then modern Saudis may painfully experience the knowledge of their desert forbearers that water, not oil, is man’s one truly indispensable resource.
Two stark, alternative futures were playing out on the arid Arabian Peninsula’s eastern and western flanks, where the oil had already given out. On the Persian Gulf to the east, Abu Dhabi had astutely invested its oil surpluses to build a low-water-intensive, international services entrepôt of banking and shipping closely integrated into, but reliant upon, the global economy that provided the food it could not grow itself. To the southwest, on the Red Sea, was highland Yemen, one of the world’s most dangerous failing states, where plunging water tables were sparking rural violence, mass migration to overcrowded cities, radical Islamic fundamentalism, and international terrorism.
The desert Muslim leader who has been most audacious at turning oil into water is Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi. Qaddafi bet a large proportion of his country’s petrodollar wealth, and his government’s own ruling legitimacy, on mankind’s grandest underground water transfer scheme—the Great Manmade River. The project mines ancient fossil water from the huge aquifers lying beneath the remote southern Sahara desert, at a depth of an inverted Empire State Building, and delivers it through a 2,000-mile network of subway-sized tunnels buried six feet under the scorching, shifting sands to the Mediterranean coast, where 85 percent of Libya’s 6 million people live. Waterless Libya first discovered that below its empty desert forty days’ camel trek from the coast lay soft, water-bearing rock structures containing 50 billion acre-feet of water—the largest known fossil water deposit on Earth—when oil-seeking Western drillers began intensive explorations in the mid-twentieth century. Much of the water in the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer originated as rain 25,000 to 75,000 years ago; more filled d
uring a second rainy period, about 4,500 to 10,000 years ago before the Sahara transformed from a wildlife-rich savanna of roaming herds pursued by tribes of hunter-gatherers into today’s desert. Enthralled by his vision of a bounteous Libya, Colonel Qaddafi launched his subterranean Manmade River with support from Occidental Petroleum magnate Armand Hammer soon after he seized power in 1969. Despite adversarial political relations with the West over Libya’s involvement with state-sponsored terrorism, other American companies, such as Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root, helped Qaddafi’s “new Nile” deliver its first water to the coast in 1991.
Yet the immensity, complexity, and expense of Libya’s heroic water transfer project have raised doubts whether it can ever be completed or deliver its intended salvation for Libya. In 1999 pipeline blowouts began to occur, shooting geysers of water 100 feet into the air; repairs were hampered by the difficulty of moving heavy machinery across the desert terrain. Even if fully realized, the Manmade River will likely deliver only enough water—less than the Jordan River system—to meet less than half of the food needs of Libya’s small but rapidly growing population. But even that amount has been enough to whet the envious thirst and warnings against Libyan overpumping from Egypt, Chad, and Sudan, under whose territory part of the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer also lies—and exacerbate worries in Egypt that the falling aquifer table might cause intolerable seepage loss of Nile basin groundwater. Like camels smelling water in the desert, Libya’s neighbors are homing in on ways to wrest a share of the Sahara’s buried water treasure for themselves.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
From Have to Have-Not: Mounting Water Distress in Asia’s Rising Giants
If water famine made the Middle East the world’s most explosive Have-Not region, the global scale and depth of the unfolding water crisis is likely to be influenced heavily by what happened in Asia’s dynamic, but water-distressed giants at the shifting fulcrum of the twenty-first century world order. Comprising nearly two-fifths of humanity, rising economic stars China and India had mobilized their renewable freshwater through giant dams and other modern waterworks to transform their once chronic hunger into sufficiency through the opportunities of the Green Revolution. Along with India’s smaller neighbor on the Indus, Pakistan, they had contributed significantly to the rapid global expansion of irrigated cropland and the spectacular tripling of world grain harvests from 1950 to 2000. Yet worsening water distress from the pressures of demographic and economic growth, and the overexploitation and environmental abuse of their natural ecosystems is causing grain production to peak out in all of them. Unless trends reverse, they may soon lack access to enough clean freshwater to feed themselves. By dint of their sheer size, their domestic responses to their water challenges will powerfully impact economic, environmental, and political conditions worldwide. China and India, together with America, produce half the world’s grain—their combined influence on international food markets is like that of OPEC on oil. The looming prospect of India and China becoming major grain importers therefore threatens to dramatically push up global food prices, crowd out the poorest and most water-famished nations, and help trigger humanitarian tragedies and political upheavals around the world.
China with 1.3 billion inhabitants, and India with 1.1 billion, are the world’s two largest, and the two fastest economically growing, major countries. Their rapid modernization, and rising average individual consumption and waste generation, puts them at the epicenter of the era’s great global tension between breakneck economic development and environmental sustainability. The outcome will help validate or discredit their contrasting and competing development models—India’s multicultural democracy driven by private internal demand and China’s politically authoritarian, state-guided mix of industrial export champions and domestic entrepreneurship—and strongly influence the nature of the political economic order of coming generations.
When it comes to water, the two giants share many characteristics. With 20 percent of the world’s population but only about 7 percent of its freshwater, China’s freshwater resources are stretched thin. The case is similar for India, with 17 percent of world inhabitants and 4 percent of its readily accessible freshwater. Both countries must use their freshwater efficiently to satisfy the demands of their large and increasingly protein-hungry populations. Yet paradoxically, as in most of the world, their water management is riddled with wasteful practices, inadequate infrastructure, inefficient allocations, and environmentally unsustainable uses. Both countries have been world-leading dam builders, although with mixed success to show for it. Both are increasingly reliant on overpumped, diminishing groundwater reserves for their irrigated agriculture and metropolitan water supplies. Both are also compounding their natural water limitations with man-made soil erosion and ruination as well as rampant pollution reminiscent of the preenvironmental and presanitary awakenings in the industrialized West. Neither has a coherent, workable, long-term solution for its impending water crisis, and both are hoping to buy time with grandiose, but environmentally dubious national water transfer schemes.
The World Bank warned in 2005 that India was at the cusp of “an era of severe water scarcity” requiring immediate changes in government management of water. By 2050, water demand is expected to double to a level that exceeded the nation’s entire available supply of freshwater. An ongoing series of environmental woes and flagging wheat and rice production are similarly awakening Chinese leaders to their incipient water scarcity crisis. In 1999, Vice Premier Wen Jiabao acknowledged that looming water supply shortages threatened the very “survival of the Chinese nation”, and in 2005, as premier, he pledged to deliver “clean water for the people.”
India’s modern history was marked by a classic cycle of irrigation intensification that created a population boom that in turn demanded further irrigation merely to keep up with living standards and population growth. British irrigation projects during the colonial era had provided the initial impetus, with India’s population rising steadily from 175 million in 1850 to nearly 300 million in 1900, then nearly quadrupling to 1.1 billion by 2005. The super crops of the Green Revolution and the postwar burst of large irrigation and hydropower dam building embraced after independence by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi in the Punjab and elsewhere initially generated an economic flourish that saved India from chronic, near famine and lifted individual living standards. Yet by the 1970s and 1980s, the boom began to fade under the weight of India’s ballooning population, the dead hand of an ineffective government bureaucracy, and an overregulated private sector. Farm productivity began to sag as delivery of irrigation water by government bureaucracies became unreliable in timing and quantity, and the second generation of government dam building proved decreasingly effective. India became a global poster child advertising that simply having many dams and large-scale water management projects was insufficient to deliver growth—they had to be appropriately designed and administered effectively. Indians began to bemoan their “Hindu rate of growth.”
The multicultural Indian democracy, however, responded with two unexpected developments. A grass roots protest sprung up in the late 1980s that effectively curtailed India’s giant dam, state-dominated era. In September 1989, some 60,000 peasants, environmentalists, and human rights advocates rallied in the Narmada River valley in western India against a massive government irrigation project that included 30 major dams that would disrupt local communities while sending most of the economic benefits far away. The Narmada rebellion was fueled by decades of pent-up discontent with state-dictated giant dam and reservoir projects that had displaced an estimated 20 million people and through poor management ruined large portions of India’s irrigated lands with salinized and waterlogged soils.
Soon after the protests, the World Bank withdrew its financial support from the Narmada River’s centerpiece dam project. Disenchantment with large dams had been growing inside the Bank as well as in the Western-led international environmentalist
and development communities. The Bank used the opportunity to support an independent World Dam Commission to assess the efficacy of its entire giant dam program. In late 2000 the commission issued a startlingly harsh condemnation of the development cost-benefits of the $75 billion the Bank had invested in large dam projects in 92 countries: most large dams ended up costing far more, profitably irrigated less cropland, produced less hydroelectric power, and delivered much less water to cities than originally advertised. The overestimated economic returns, moreover, also ignored the social inequities of displacing some 80 million rural people worldwide, the often disproportionate distribution of economic benefits, and the spreading of malaria among the rural poor. Their large impacts on river watersheds and aquatic ecosystems were often deleterious. Indeed, most dam benefits, the commission concluded, could have been achieved without many negative impacts by redirecting funds to decentralized, efficiency-encouraging, often smaller-scale alternatives, including revival of traditional, preindustrial era waterworks. The World Commission on Dams Report was a resounding turning point: The global era of unbridled giant dam building was over. World Bank programs since then demanded demonstrable, broader stakeholder benefits, while nongovernment activists from the industrialized world—where giant dam potentials had long been fully exploited—began to lobby reflexively against almost any giant dam in developing countries whether they had additional capacity for it or not, and for dam removals at home.