Middle East Drought Looses Flood of 'Water Refugees'
Mideast Water Crisis Brings Misery, Uncertainty
NPR.org, Jan. 8, 2009
The Middle
East is facing its worst water crisis in decades. For three summers,
the annual rains have failed to come. Farmland has dried up across the
region in Iraq, Syria, southeast Turkey and Lebanon.
While oil was the resource that defined the last century, water and its scarcity may define this one.
Experts say
the climate is warming in the Fertile Crescent, the area of the Tigris
and Euphrates rivers, contributing to the water shortage and helping to
create a new phenomenon — water refugees.
This winter,
rain has barely settled into the hard, cracked farmland in northern
Syria. There was a time when the fields were green most of the year,
but the summer droughts have taken a toll. Farther east is the Badia, a
vast rangeland, where thousands of people tend herds of sheep.
Addami is a
traditional village where the houses are white domes of baked clay.
This summer, Addami was completely abandoned during the driest months.
"There was
no water and too much sand," says villager Nofa Hamid, 51, who has been
tending sheep since she was a child. "It got into everything, even the
kitchen."
"It was crazy; the sand was everywhere this summer," she says.
Life has
never been easy in Addami. But Ismar Mohammed, a 43-year-old shepherd
wrapped in a black wool robe against the cold, says he was wealthy by
local standards as the owner of the area's largest herd.
He had to
drive his flock more than 150 miles for water. With no luck and no
grass, he had to buy feed for his 275 sheep, and that meant he had to
sell some of them to feed the rest.
"No
question, I had to do this otherwise they would die, and I had to feed
my kids. Before the drought, I used to have 400 head," he says.
"No question, we were doing fine, just except for this drought, which is affecting us very badly," he says."
'Perfect Storm' Creates Water Refugees
More than
160 villages are abandoned now in Syria alone. According to a United
Nations report on the drought, 800,000 people have lost their
livelihood. Hundreds of thousands left once-fertile land that turned to
dust and pitched tents near the big cities, looking for any kind of
work.
"It's an emergency," says Syrian economist Nabil Sukkar. "If we have two more years of drought, then we do ... have a crisis."
Formerly
with the World Bank, Sukkar now heads a private consulting firm for
development and investment. He has been researching the emergency,
including its economic and social costs.
"I've gone
out and I saw some people in the tents. I told them, 'From where you
are coming? How do you manage?' They said, 'We find short-term work,'
but this is not sustainable," he says.
The mass migration to the cities has created a new community of displaced people across Syria and Iraq.
"Water
scarcity is forcing people off the land," says Hussein Amery, an expert
on Middle East water management and a professor at the Colorado School
of Mines.
He says the
policy failures that have made the emergency worse. "Therefore, these
refugees are very much water refugees, they are a product of water
scarcity in the region," Amery says.
He says the water crisis has been building for years.
"The water
refugees are a product of climate change, mismanaged water resources.
It's a product of population explosion; it's a lot of things. It's a
perfect storm that is wreaking havoc in the rural farming sector of
Syria and Iraq," he says.
Changing History Of Outdated Techniques, Waste
Due east of
the Syrian capital, Damascus, is the city of Palmyra, a popular tourist
destination. The city's ancient Roman ruins are a draw for Japanese
tourists — and a livelihood for the locals.
Palmyra, hit
hard by the drought, is also the headquarters for the Syrian government
response. Emergency measures include food aid for families and low-cost
loans for farmers.
At the government office for development, Mohsan Nahas says Palmyra is experimenting with new water-saving techniques.
"I have talked about the oasis we've been setting up. That's being done with drip irrigation," he says.
Nahas offers
visitors a slideshow to illustrate what he is up against — a dust storm
so large it could be seen from space on Google Earth. Conditions on the
ground were intolerable: Sand blew into houses, mixing with food and
affecting people's eyesight.
With the widespread drought, a food crisis is looming. For the first time, Syria now has to import wheat.
Sukkar, the
economist, says things won't get better unless the country changes a
history of wasteful water management and outdated farming techniques.
"Unfortunately, we haven't introduced modern technology, and so we are dependent on rainfall, period," he says.
Politics, Not Climate, At Root Of Problem
But
rainfall, or lack of it, is not the only culprit, he says. Syria and
Iraq blame Turkey's huge network of dams on the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers for reducing water supplies by 50 percent.
Turkey is
the site of the headwaters of a river system that Syria and Iraq depend
on. An informal agreement determines the flow downstream.
"When we had
bad relations with Turkey, they reduced the flow of water despite the
agreement, and now, thank God, we have excellent relations with Turkey,
and hopefully, we will not see any cutoff of water," Sukkar says.
Turkey says
there is enough water for everyone, but Syria and Iraq waste their
share. Amery, the water expert, says the Turks are partly right.
"The issue is water but it goes far beyond water," he says.
Amery says
the key to head off a water crisis is more efficient management of a
scarce resource. But he adds politics, not climate, is the problem.
"A lot of
Arabs believe that Turkey is trying to assert itself as a regional
superpower," he says, "and water is being used as a tool to advance
that interest."
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