paid little more than 10 percent: Postel, Last Oasis, 166–167.
378–379. Mexico City loses enough water every day: Sterling, 32; Gleick, “Making Every Drop Count,” 43.
“Nothing is more useful than water”: Smith, Wealth of Nations, 174.
“When the well is dry”: Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1733, cited in “Water Fact Sheet Looks at Threats, Trends, Solutions,” Pacific Institute, www.pacinst.org/reports/water_fact_sheet.
1,700 times markup: Lavelle and Kurlantzick.
$400 billion per year industry: Peter H. Gleick and Jason Morrison, “Water Risks That Face Business and Industry,” in Gleick, World’s Water, 2006–2007, 158–165. Water utilities were dominated by two French and one German company: Veolia Environnement, Suez S.A., and RWE Thames Water. GE had made a $3.2 billion investment in the $140 billion per year wastewater services sector. The fragmentation of the water business made reliable estimates of comprehensive industry size hard to come by. Some $85 billion per year was spent on private industrial water treatment to supply purified water to water-intensive industries, such as semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, certain chemical processing, pulp and paper, and food and petrochemicals. Drinking-water purification, desalinization, and water distribution infrastructure were other large segments.
aquifer reservoirs accumulated by nature: A good deal of this deep fossil water was inaccessible even with modern drilling technologies.
have less than 700 gallons per person: Postel, Last Oasis, 28–29. Less than 1,000 cubic meters (2,740 liters) daily per capita defined water scarcity, 1,000 to 2,000 per day defined water stress, and more than 2,000 per day defined water sufficiency. Clarke, Water, 12, cites more than 20 percent of runoff used as a sign of water scarcity; 10 to 20 percent usage as a serious water problem, and less than 5 percent usage as water sufficiency.
world resource demand increases: Diamond, Collapse, 495. Diamond argues that by far the greatest impact comes from the 80 percent who live in the third world, including the rising Chinese and Indian populations, increasing their meager consumption of water and other resources to the prodigious levels of Western industrial societies.
Chapter Fifteen: Thicker Than Blood: The Water-Famished Middle East
outgrew their internal water resources: Allan, 6.
“the Middle East and North Africa”: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 33.
quadrupling of Middle East wheat flour imports: Allan, 8.
shallow wells and qanats: Much of the drinking water of modern Tehran was still supplied by qanats.
forecast to swell another 63 percent to 600 million: Andrew Martin, “Mideast Facing Difficult Choice, Crops or Water,” New York Times, July 21, 2008.
75 million inhabitants: Economist staff, Pocket World in Figures, 2009, 16.
completion of the high dam at Aswan: Some 96 percent of Egyptians lived on the crowded “ribbon of land along the Nile’s banks,” which comprised a mere 4 percent of the country’s total area. Elhance, 6.
“The national security of Egypt”: Boutros Boutros-Ghali, quoted in “Water Scarcity, Quality in Africa Aggravated by Augmented Population Growth, International Environmental Reporter, October 1989, cited in Postel, Last Oasis, 73.
“We depend upon the Nile 100 percent”: Anwar el-Sadat, quoted in Collins, 213.
25 million: See Smith, Man and Water, 205; Collins, 140.
within a dozen feet of reaching the total shutoff levels: Collins, 225–226.
“The only matter that could take Egypt to war again”: Anwar el-Sadat, quoted in Gleick, World’s Water, 2006–2007, 202. Senior Egyptian officials have made the same point repeatedly since then, including then Egyptian foreign minister and future U.N. secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who said in 1988: “The next war in our region will be over the waters of the Nile, not politics.”
“Preserving Nile waters for Egypt”: Boutros-Ghali, 322.
Mengistu Haile Mariam: Collins, 214–215. Mengistu overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie, whose longtime dream had been a dam at Lake Tana, in 1974. By 1978 he began pressing for Ethiopia’s internal development of its water resources with a dam. Mengistu aggravated his bad relations with Sadat by conjuring up historic Ethiopian fears of Egyptian-Islamic territorial ambitions in the Horn of Africa, accusing Egypt of stirring up trouble in his country’s backyard by arming Somalis in the Ogaden and supporting breakaway rebels in Eritrea.
the bureau concluded: Collins, 171.
found an accommodating negotiating partner: At first Nasser had tried and failed to bully Sudan’s leaders into acquiescence by pressing Egyptian territorial claims on Sudan’s ancient Nubia.
agreed to move jointly against upstream nations: Erlich, 6.
Selassie had obtained public declarations of support: Collins, 170. The United States conditioned its backing for Nile waters development for the Aswan Dam upon the cooperation of all Nile states.
several times costlier: Grey and Sadoff, 545–571. World Bank water experts David Grey and Claudia Sadoff note that water-shock-prone countries are typically among the world’s poorest, and that such countries often face more difficult hydrological patrimonies than industrialized nations did during their earlier phases of economic takeoff.
Nile Waters Agreement: Egypt’s Master Water Plan of 1981, which envisioned increasing Nile water yields by up to one-quarter through new projects situated upstream, also rather fancifully ignored the region’s rampant political instability and any deleterious environmental side effects.
abruptly terminated in 1984: The Darfur genocide in western Sudan, likewise, was supported by Sudan’s northern-led Muslim government and included assaults on the water supplies of indigenous, mostly black non-Muslim residents.
Egypt blocked an African Development Bank loan: Alan Cowell, “Cairo Journal: Now, a Little Steam. Later, Maybe a Water War,” New York Times, February 7, 1990.
Israeli…engineers were doing feasibility studies: Darwish; Ward, 197.
diversion of an additional 5 billion cubic meters: Allan, 67–68, 152–153. The New Valley Project was intended to transform Egypt’s desolate desert northeast of Aswan into an agricultural and industrial oasis for some 7 million people relocated from Egypt’s overcrowded Nile corridor.
“While Egypt is taking the Nile water”: Meles Zenawi, quoted in Mike Thomson, “Nile Restrictions Anger Ethiopia,” BBC News, February 3, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4232107.stm. While steadfastly denying that they blocked international financing for other countries’ irrigation projects, Egyptian leaders argued that they were compelled by Egypt’s lack of natural rainfall and domestic demographic trends to expand water diversion for ambitious new desert developments. In 2005, Dia El Quosy, a senior adviser to the Egyptian Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, told the BBC, “It’s not only the production of food. It’s also about the generation of employment. Some 40% of our manpower are farmers and if these people are not given opportunities and jobs they will immediately move to the cities and you can see how crowded Cairo is already.” When asked in 2003 if Egypt would respond with force if Ethiopia or an independent southern Sudan region cut Nile flows north, Boutros-Ghali replied, “I don’t believe that any country will dare to cut the water because…the national security of Egypt is based on water, on the sources of the Nile.” “Talking Point.”
heavily subsidized prices: “Of Water and Wars” Elhance, 60. In the late 1990s, subsidies for energy, some for pumping and moving water, amounted to another $4 to $6 billion.
“Among the pervasive beliefs in Egyptian culture”: Collins, 218.
imports—providing up to two-fifths: Brown, “Grain Harvest Growth Slowing.”
30 miles inland: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 170–171.
from 32 to only 2 billion cubic meters: Lester Brown, “The Effect of Emerging Water Shortages on the World’s Food,” in McDonald and Jehl, 85; McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 170–171.
they are projecte
d to add nearly 50 percent: Economist staff, Pocket World in Figures, 2009, 16, 17.
might decline up to 25 percent: Elhance, 58.
Mubarak called in the army: “Not by Bread Alone,” Economist, April 12, 2008, 55.
Nile Basin Initiative: Sadoff and Grey, “Beyond the River.” Sadoff and Grey posit four potential sources of gain from cooperation: (1) better management of ecosystems supporting the basin; (2) higher yields from the rivers; (3) reduction in costs from competition and tensions; and (4) benefits, such as increased trade, between nations arising from their amity in river cooperation.
10 billion cubic meters: Interview with Nile Basin Initiative participant.
withdrawing 3.2 billion cubic meters: Sher, 36. See also Allan, 74–77. The total of 3.2 billion cubic meters (2.6 million acre-feet) includes Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, but excludes Syria on the basin’s periphery.
one-third as much freshwater as needed: Allan, 76.
Eric Johnston: Ibid., 78; Postel, “Sharing the River out of Eden,” 61.
doom the landmark water accord: Elhance, 113. The Johnston plan operated on the principle that surface water should be allocated by reasonable proximity to irrigable land fed by natural gravity, which placed useful needs above territorial land rights to water. Although the plan was not enacted, the proportions it allocated remained the baseline for water-sharing negotiations over the next half a century.
Golda Meir had put Israel’s Arab neighbors on notice: Postel, “Sharing the River out of Eden,” 62. On the Skirmish over the Jordan, see also Darwish.
“In reality the Six Day War”: Sharon, 167.
Arab air force lay smoldering: Goldschmidt, 326. The Suez Canal would be closed for eight years. It remained the violent front line between the two enemies, marked by occasional firing across its waters and air skirmishes above it. The Yom Kippur War (1973) began with a simultaneous surprise assault by Syria on the Golan Heights and an amphibious thrust by Egypt across the canal to establish a bridgehead that allowed its troops to temporarily recover much of the Sinai. But when General Ariel Sharon and a small tank force snuck behind Egyptian lines nine days later and managed to cut off the Egyptian expeditionary force from Egypt proper, the Suez Canal water boundary line was reestablished for another two years.
another third of Israel’s water: Allan, 82. The three headwater tributaries of the Jordan—the Banias, the Hasbani, and the Dan—all originated in springs fed by an underground aquifer on the slopes of Mount Hermon in the Golan. Another one-fifth of Israel’s water supply was recycled, and desalinization plants had capacity for another one-third and were replacing the water in the depleting coastal aquifer. Israel wasted little time in augmenting the flow from the Golan by opening new springs in the Huleh Valley to channel more floodwaters to the Sea of Galilee.
20 to 40 percent of their income for water: Pearce, 160–161. On the decline in West Bank Palestinian irrigated cropland see Darwish.
Gaza Aquifer: Postel, “Sharing the River out of Eden,” 63. Gaza water was below the minimal drinking water standards of the World Health Organization. The international community financed, with Israeli approval, a state-of-the-art sewage treatment plant in Gaza to try to mitigate the problem.
1987 intifada: Aaron T. Wolf, “‘Water Wars’ and Other Tales of Hydromythology,” in McDonald and Jehl, 116–117.
put off to the final-status stage: Postel, Last Oasis, xxiv, xxv. By 2000 Israel was drawing half to three-quarters more water than envisioned by the original Johnston plan that the Arabs had rejected.
secretly meeting for years: Elhance, 107, 113. Jordan depended heavily on the water from the Yarmuk-Jordan since its only other major water source was the nonrenewable Qa Disi aquifer on its southeastern border with Saudi Arabia, which the Saudis were rapidly drawing down toward exhaustion at the prodigious rate of up to 250 million cubic meters per year.
Wazzani fed the Hasbani: Tensions were further heightened because Israel’s water reserves were at their lowest historical level at that moment.
international diplomatic flurry: “Israel Hardens Stance on Water,” BBC News, September 17, 2002, http://www.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/22265139.stm; Luft; Stefan Deconinck, “Jordan River Basin: The Wazzani-Incident in the Summer of 2002—a Phony War?” Waternet (July 2006), http://www.waternet.be/jordan_river/wazzani.htm.
very close to a breakthrough: Working through the offices of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was trusted by the Israelis and had developed good relations with Syria’s leadership, the two sides reportedly had worked out virtually all the major issues of a Golan water deal between them and were close to being ready to move the final negotiations up to the official level. But the opportunity was reportedly killed by the Bush administration, which refused to give the comfort sought by Syrian leaders that they could count on American support as Syria moved out of its orbit of relations with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Israel’s attack on Gaza over Hamas’s resumption of missile launches at Israel in late 2008 reinflamed discord, which scuttled any chance of an early settlement.
cut agricultural water consumption by nearly one-third: Allan, 96–97; Elhance, 96.
pay full market price: “Don’t Make the Desert Bloom,” Economist, June 7, 2008, 60. The actual water price farmers paid in 2008 was still only about half the market rate due to hidden subsidies, but the agreement signaled the direction of things.
agriculture’s share: Postel, “Sharing the River out of Eden,” 64.
microirrigation methods: Ibid., 43, 64.
quintupled their water productivity: Pearce, 300.
fall sharply—by as much as two-thirds: Ibid., 254; Economist staff, “Tapping the Oceans,” Economist Technology Quarterly, June 7, 2008, 27. The main improvements were in energy recapture and membrane technology.
Israel to launch five: From the 1970s Israel had been studying elaborate schemes to pipe water from the Mediterranean or Red sea to the Dead Sea, exploiting the decline in altitude to generate the great amount of electricity needed to power desalinization.
Ashqelon, opened in 2005: Ashqelon water costs were about 55 U.S. cents versus about 30 cents per cubic meter from Galilee.
by 2020 Israel expects: “Don’t Make the Desert Bloom,” 60; Postel, “Sharing the River out of Eden,” 64.
10 times the per capita supply of Israel: Sher, 36.
control the headwaters: Turkey’s inclusion in NATO was strongly influenced by its strategic control of the strait controlling access to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea. During the Cold War, it helped deny the Soviet Union’s navy easy access and influence in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, stretched Soviet supply lines in aiding distant allies like North Vietnam, and in general added to the burdens that helped lead to the Soviet Union’s collapse. The strait today remains a strategic choke point of key shipping lanes, including those for oil from the large new fields and pipelines of central Asia to the West.
upriver to Turkey: From the early 1970s to 2002, Turkey built some 700 dams and had plans to build 500 more. Douglas Jehl, “In Race to Tap the Euphrates, the Upper Hand Is Upstream,” New York Times, August 25, 2002.
double national irrigated cropland and electricity: Elhance, 148–149.
Ataturk reservoir: “One-third of Paradise,” Economist, February 26, 2005, 78.
“The twenty-first century will belong”: Turgut Ozal, quoted in Ward, 192.
cut Syria’s share of the Euphrates’ water: Ibid.
consume half again as much water as exists: Jehl, “In Race to Tap the Euphrates, the Upper Hand Is Upstream.” The Euphrates held about 35 billion cubic meters of water.
Turkey’s vision: Elhance, 150–151; Sher, 35–37. The first pipeline, which drew water from the little-used Seyhan and Ceyhan rivers, was expected to carry 1.28 billion cubic meters per year, and the second, drawing from the Tigris, 0.9 billion cubic meters annually.
409–410. Euphrates slowed to a trickle: Elhance, 144.
clandest
ine support: Allan, 73.
force Saddam to withdraw: Gleick, World’s Water, 2006–2007, 204.
Syria’s constriction of the Euphrates’ water: Elhance, 142–143. Syria slowed flows in the spring of 1974 to show its anger with Iraqi criticism of its policy toward Israel and again in 1975 after Iraq signed an accord with Iran. Saudi Arabian and Soviet diplomacy resolved the 1975 crisis by getting Syria to release additional water downstream from the Tabqa Dam. Ironically, the greatest danger from a catastrophic dam break in the region was probably in Sadaam’s own Iraq. The large Mosul dam on the Tigris near ancient Nineveh had been so poorly constructed in 1984 that by 2007 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was warning occupying American military commanders that it was in imminent danger of collapse—threatening to kill hundreds of thousands of people between Mosul and Baghdad and deliver a devastating setback to the American effort to build a stable, pluralistic state in post-Saddam Iraq. Patrick Cockburn, “Iraqi Dam Burst Would Drown 500,000,” Independent, October 31, 2007, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/Middle-east/Iraq’s-dam-burst-would-drown–500,000–398364.html.
restore only 40 percent of the marshes: Alwash, 56–58; “One-third of Paradise,” 77–78; Edward Wong, “Marshes a Vengeful Hussein Drained Stir Again,” New York Times, February 21, 2004; Marc Santora, “Marsh Arabs Cling to Memories of a Culture Nearly Crushed by Hussein,” New York Times, April 28, 2003. More water than Iraq had available was needed to flush out salts and other toxins to restore a larger area.
“We do not say we share their oil”: Süleyman Demirel, quoted in “The Euphrates Fracas: Damascus Woos (and) Warns Ankara,” Mideast Mirror, July 30, 1992, cited in Elhance, 144.
idled seven of 10 turbines: Whitaker.
“with more water than”: Recep Tayyip Erdogen, quoted in Sally Buzbee, “Drought Threatens Iraq’s Crops and Water Supply,” Associated Press wire on Yahoo!News, July 10, 2008, AP20080710.
control of Iraq’s largest hydroelectric dam: Daniel Williams, “Kurds Seize Iraq Land Past Borders in Blow to U.S. Pullout Plan,” March 5, 2009, Bloomberg, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aeLL5Yyjul18&refer=home.
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