Arguing over water supplies.

 “Whisky is for drinking, water is for fighting over”.  Mark Twain.

Wm. Mulholland will go down in history as a water engineer who was also sharp operator.  Sensing that the town of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />los angeles was growing rapidly, he negotiated away the water rights of the owens valley, 233-miles north of Los Angeles and built a huge aqueduct and 164 tunnels to transport the water from the owens valley across the mojave desert.  At a ceremony the day it was opened, Mulholland spoke his famous words: "There it is. Take it" (Wikipedia).

Within 13 years the aqueduct had drained the 100-square-mile owens lake dry (starting the California Water Wars, the story of the film Chinatown). The acquisition of water rights  involved bribery and deception by Mulholland. The Owens Valley farmers tried to dynamite the aqueduct, to divert the flow of water. Los Angeles was forced to negotiate, and Mulholland was quoted as saying he "half-regretted the demise of so many of the valley’s orchard trees, because now there were no longer enough trees to hang all the troublemakers who live there", according to his grand daughter, rose mulholland.  But the future of Los Angeles was assured, as were the fortunes of the farmers in the San Fernando Valley. They got unlimited supplies of water for their cotton production, their famous orchards and their vegetables.

We need to remember that there is more than enough water in the world to satisfy everyone.  Planet Earth’s systems pump out enough water each year to give each person nearly 7,000 cubic metres. (The data in this account is taken from the excellent UN Human Development Report 2006: Beyond Scarcity….global water crisis, edited by the painstaking Kevin Watkins).  Hydrologists reckon that people need an average of 1,700 cubic metres to survive comfortably each year.  But we should remember that many don’t get enough. People in the gaza strip for example get only 320 cubic metres a year (compared with Americans who consume 1,900 cubic metres each year). So why are there so many arguments over how to share the world’s water supplies? There are a huge number of rivers that have to be shared between countries. One hundred and forty-five countries that have to exist within these shared basins, accounting for over 90% of the world’s populations.  Some of these river basins get together and resolve their disagreements over the allocation of this water between the countries involved.  Others act first, and argue later, and this can produce disastrous results.

“By means of water we give life to everything” (The Koran 21:30). There are four major problems in sharing water between countries.  First, competition for supplies.  The dilemma is within those basins where country gets its water up-stream and then leaves what it does not require for countries further down-stream.  Being up-stream of course hugely improves one’s bargaining position!  Second, the quality of the water.  Many rivers start off in pristine condition (this includes sufficient levels of oxygen to ensure the health of a river’s fishes) and end up full of sewage and other toxins – nitrates, phosphates, arsenic, many other toxic metals and of course salt. The river rhine is the most polluted in europe:  a fifth of the entire world’s chemical production lies along its banks and many of these factories discharge their waste into this river.  Third, the timing of the supplies.  Countries require a stable supply.  In those basins where the rainfall is low, this can be difficult and such projects as dam building can aggravate the problems.  Fourth, the essential supplies contained in the water.  Many river deltas rely on the silt brought down by rivers to maintain the fertility of their soils.  Many also rely on a steady supply of fish in the river.  Again, dam building can create a huge amount of damage, if we shall see.

Take the huge water systems of the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, for example. The Colorado River runs for 1,450 miles, through arizona and and down past mexico, supplying water to a region that receives little annual rainfall. The river is used for irrigation for the US cotton farmers as well as for generating hydroelectric power and for supplying water to distant urban areas. It even provides water for southern California’s Imperial Valley, a productive agricultural region converted from a desert. Typically, the Americans can use whatever they want because the river runs through the US first.  And the Mexicans are left with the dregs!  As a result, the vast wetlands at the mouth of the Colorado River have been reduced to just a fraction of their former size and the river has shrivelled to a mere trickle.  Mexico receives almost none of the water it requires to sustain its population.  The Rio Grande, at 1,885 miles, is the third longest river in the US, running through texas and ending in the Gulf of Mexico.  In 2001 for the first time, the delta formed a sandbar 150 metres wide, so that the river failed to empty into the sea for the first time ever. A fore-taste of the future?  If so, the stream of water disputes between both countries will develop into a torrent.

The Tigris-Euphrates basin:  A common source of conflict centres on irrigation demands.  Thus, these issues are critical in areas such as the middle east, with its climate and rainfall levels.  Among countries with highly developed irrigation systems egypt, iraq, syria all depend on water flowing from their neighbours for at least two-thirds of their water. The Tigris-Euphrates basin serves Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, with a total population there of 103 millions. Turkey’s south-east region (Anatolia) has seen the creation of 21 dams and 1.7 million hectares of irrigated land, and this can reduce the flow of water in Syria by about a third, creating huge conflicts. (Medzioni and Wolf: the Euphrates river watershed. World Bank 2006.)

The problem is more acute in the Israeli-Jordon-Palestine water conflicts.  Here, the area is one of the more water-scarce areas in the world.  The Palestinian population relies almost entirely on trans-boundary water, most of it shared with Israel. Much of this is shared unequally.  The Palestinian population is only half the size of Israel but they consume only 10-15% as much water.  On the West Bank, Israeli settlers consume on average 620 cubic metres per person annually and the Palestinians are left with less than100 cubic metres.  In the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), people get an average of 320 cubic metres of water annually, probably the lowest levels in the world. Water shortages in the Occupied Territories are a major constraint on agricultural development and livelihoods and many Palestinians see it as a long term injustice because the current water allocation rules lock in this unequal access to the aquifers.

As the aquifers sink because of over-extraction on one side of the border, so the water table replenishes itself with polluted water sources – often sea water – and this water contains arsenic, nitrates and sulphates, often making the groundwater unusable in the other countries. So what explains these gross inequities?  First, Palestinians do not have established rights to the waters of the Jordan Basin.  Almost all the water needs in the OPT are met by groundwater aquifers.  But the Palestinians get very little water from even these aquifers!  Nearly three quarters of the aquifer is recharged within the West Bank, and flows from the West Bank towards the sea but much of this is not used by the Palestinians.  Why?  Because Israeli representatives on the Joint Water Committee stringently regulate the quantity and depth of wells operated by the Palestinians.  Less stringent rules are applied to Israeli settlers enabling them to sink deeper wells.  With only 13% of all wells in the West Bank, Israeli settlers account for about 53% of groundwater extraction.  This may seem outrageous but it comes as no surprise to anyone living in the middle east.  It means that irrigation is under-developed, not because the Palestinians do not want it, but primarily because there is insufficient water available.  Also, because of the water shortages, many Palestinians rely on outside deliveries from Israeli companies, which are vulnerable and often unreliable.  Also, the building of the Separation Wall has meant that some Palestinians have lost their wells which have become separated from their fields, especially around the very fertile regions around Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem and Ramallah.  These stresses are in stark contrast with what occurs in Jordan since the Peace Accord between Israel and Jordan in 1994.  Since then both countries have co-operated to build water storage facilities in Lake Tiberias thus improving water supplies for Jordan farmers.  As the UN Report points out:  “Perhaps more than in any other setting, water security between Israel and the OPT is bound up in wider problems of conflict and perceptions of national security”. How true!