"Wars of the next century will be over water."

-World Bank, 1995.

Seventy percent of the earth’s surface is covered with water and two thirds of the human body is composed of it. Yet millions of people around the world are suffering from water shortages, and a growing number of the world’s nations are fearing potential crises due to ever decreasing water resources. The dramatic warning at the top of this page was issued by the World bank shortly before a 1995 water conference held in Stockholm. Several of the world’s water problems involve inter-state conflicts over shared resources. India angers downstream Bangladesh by diverting the waters of the Ganges, while Slovakia and Hungary are at loggerheads over a huge hydroelectric dam on the Danube. Many more states, however, have to deal with the increasing scarcity of local resources. India and China, for example, have had to relocate the homes of millions of their people in order to build reservoirs, and farmers in Western United States are selling their water rights to cities.

Of all the world’s water hot spots, perhaps nowhere is the looming threat of its disappearance greater than in the modern Middle East. A recent prediction in the Economist reads, " if there were to be a water war anywhere, the Middle East with its thirst and its controversial river basins, would be a likely candidate". However, problems with the supply of water have always been part of the Middle Easterner’s lives and livelihoods. North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula consist mostly of barren landscapes with arid climates, and, apart from the coastal areas, the region’s annual rainfall is meager. The Arab World is mostly dry except for its few major river basins and limited underground supplies of water (wells and springs). Concern over the availability of water in the region dates as far back as the Bronze Age in ancient Mesopotamia. Egypt’s rulers, dating from the Hiksus, to the Mamluks, to the Ottomans sent expeditions to the upper Nile as an expression of their concern for securing a stable supply of fresh water. The tribes of pre-Islamic Arabia are well-known for their battles over water sources. Yet one characteristic especially attributed to early Middle Easterner’s has been their adaptability to the scarcity of water resources shortages by either settling along river banks or living a nomadic life, constantly moving from one water source to another.

The water problems of the region’s earlier periods have never reached the dimensions of the hydro-paranoia expressed by politicians of the Middle East since the second half of this century. Water is now considered by some statesmen, scholars and journalists to have become a potentially significant destabilizing element in the affairs of Arab countries. The three major rivers of the Arab world are the major sources of tension between their respective riparian states. Water conflicts in the region center around the Nile basin, shared by Egypt, Uganda, Sudan and Ethiopia (among others); the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers divided among Turkey, Syria and Iraq; and the Jordan river involving Israel, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

Resolving inter-state water disputes is now considered to be a matter of national security for many Arab nations. However, the answer to many water problems may lie more in the reallocation of water resources between uses within a state rather than reallocation between different states. The issue of water shortages is a two-sided coin; it has its international aspect and its domestic aspect. These two aspects are complementary and, if pursued simultaneously, may eventually resolve the water shortages of the Arab World. The two aspects are therefore the proposed sub-agendas for the topic at hand.

Countries such as Turkey and Iran need on average 400 billion cubic centimeters of water per year, and receive over 600 billion cubic centimeters of water from rainfall and rivers and, thus, a perceived shortage of water resulting from demographic explosion is inaccurate. However, one may claim that this assumption is theoretical. Since the threat of decreasing water resources is felt, the problem evidently lies in the distribution and management of water itself.

Efficient management of water is needed on both the demand and supply side. The demand side of water is the sum total of the usage of water within the various sectors of a given society, those sectors being: agriculture, industry and domestic. "Farming is the big thief of fresh water, consuming up to 80% of water allocation in the Middle East," calculates a writer for the Economist. Traditional methods of irrigation, such as flooding or spray-irrigating fields, waste at least half the quantity of water used; water which either evaporates or seeps through the soil, never reaching plant roots. Israel is one of the only countries in the region to use innovative new methods, such as drip irrigation, on a large scale, thereby effectively reducing the quantity of water required for agriculture. With the advancement of modern production methods, and the consistent attempts of many Arab countries to industrialize their economies, industry has become an added source of pressure on local water resources. The inability of many Arab states to cope with industrial demand for water has led some of them to adopt drastic measures in dealing with this problem. Jordan, for example, has adopted a policy of refusing to issue licenses to any new industries which depend in the process of their operation on large quantities of water. Domestic water use is also quite high in many parts of the Arab worlds. In an effort to combat this trend, media campaigns have been launched in several Arab states, including Egypt, in an effort to steer the populace towards rationalizing water use in the home. Yet outdated sewage systems in many cities only serve to worsen the problem. It has been estimated that, on a global level, "most city supply systems leak 30-50% of their water underground". In Jordan the level of water which does not reach consumers is as high as 56%. Restructuring an entire city’s sewage system is, however, extremely costly and many developing states do not have sufficient funds. Other problems may also complicate the process; for example, plans to update Cairo’s sewage system in the early 1980s failed to include most of Old Cairo (badly in need of treatment) due to the absence of maps to detail the layout of the old system. Other ideas for efficient water management include proposals to treat sewage water for reuse in agriculture.

Although such proposals promise to be successful in reducing the amount of water wasted, they have not yet been adopted on a large scale in the Arab World. Still, most Arab countries have formulated and, to some extent, implemented plans for the efficient management of water, especially in the agricultural sector. The plans of the Maghreb countries (Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco) are particularly comprehensive and far-sighted, due to the absence of major rivers in this region, and the relative financial superiority of Morocco and Tunisia in particular.

Regarding control of the supply side of water resources, there have been various attempts to increase the water supply through non-conventional methods. One of the most prominent examples is the Libyan " Great Man-Made River". This experiment was an attempt to address one of the problems many Arab countries are facing, namely, fresh water located inconveniently at large distances from populated areas. The Libyan government embarked on an extensive project of building a pipeline to deliver water from aquifers in the southern deserts to the coastal tracts. Although this venture seems to address the problem, it is very expensive and rather impractical, because of the finite nature of the water sources it draws upon. Therefore, as Libya is facing economic hardships, this solution may prove to become increasingly difficult to sustain in the future. A similar project to the Libyan one, is Turkey’s proposed "peace pipeline", a comprehensive, if ambitious, project, which is the brain child of Turkish President Turgut Ozal, and was proposed by him when he was Prime Minister in the mid-1980s. The proposal is to divert water from two Turkish rivers, and carry it through a pipe system to the Gulf and the Near East. This project would, however, have needed great cooperation between the states involved, a matter which has proved difficult to achieve even on a minor scale where water issues are concerned. The proposal has since been rejected , mainly by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, who claimed that desalination is comparatively cheaper; political considerations may also have caused many Arab countries to be reluctant to pursue a project which would cause them to become heavily dependent on Turkey for a resource as essential as water.

Other water-supply projects have included those which actually search for new sources of water. Modern technology plays a defining role in this endeavor. Recent satellite photographs, for example, have resulted in the discovery of an extensive underground river below Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The plans of the Maghreb states also rely heavily on searching for previously undiscovered underground water. Furthermore, projects which save naturally wasted water, and deliver it to where it is needed, help increase the supply of water to those places. Such projects include the White Nile Canal (Jonglei Canal), started between Egypt and Sudan to prevent the massive evaporation of water from the swamps surrounding the White Nile. This joint venture remains incomplete, however, due to the political disagreements between the two countries, and Sudan’s civil war. Among the more conventional efforts to increase fresh water supplies are the numerous dams built (or projected to be built) in the Arab world and the surrounding region, and the desalination of water in the Gulf and the Maghreb states.

The above examples provide us with some knowledge of how Arab countries could start to manage water more efficiently. However, this is a relatively new field of study and there is room for additional ideas. One has to bear in mind, though, that one should concentrate on relatively cheap and efficient methods of saving water such as using drip irrigation in agriculture, as opposed to more expensive and perhaps less useful projects such as those that involve building dams.

As stated before, many Arab countries have to share important water resources with neighboring countries. As states’ populations increase year by year, the stress on limited water resources increases and causes countries to sense a growing threat from neighboring countries’ intake of mutual water resources. This apparent threat may have spurred the willingness of Arab politicians and scholars to attend conferences on water, such as the symposium on water in the Arab World held at Harvard University in 1993, the International Water Conference held in Stockholm in 1995, and a conference held in Marrakech in 1997. The major water conflicts in the Arab world concern the three major river systems in the region: the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the river Jordan. Each of these cases shall now be examined separately.

The River Nile runs through ten African countries. The main conflict over its waters (and the one that pertains the most to the Arab World) is between Egypt, the Sudan and Ethiopia. Egypt depends on the Nile for its entire water supply, and securing the downstream parts of the river has thus always been one of Egypt’s national priorities.

The 1929 Nile Waters Agreement between the Sudan and Egypt was renegotiated in 1959, and currently provides 55,500 million cubic meters of water to Egypt and 18,500 million cubic meters of water to the Sudan annually. In addition, there has been the above mentioned Jonglei Canal project which has been abandoned due to civil unrest in Sudan, and tensions between the two countries.

Of all the countries that share the Nile, Egypt is the most vulnerable to decreases in the Nile water level, since the river gathers all of its water outside Egypt’s borders. Tourism and agriculture (and thus a large part of Egypt’s economy) are dependent on a steady, reliable supply of water. Due to the Nile’s importance, in 1990 Egypt stopped a loan from the African Development Bank to Ethiopia, which it believed was to be used to build a dam on a tributary to the river. As Boutros Ghali (Egypt’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs at the time) said in 1988, "... the national security of Egypt is...a question of water."

Concentrated efforts by Egypt to reach agreements concerning equitable distribution of the Nile water have been largely futile. These efforts are hard to implement due to the unstable political environment of many of the riparian states, such as Ethiopia and the Sudan. This is exemplified by an unsuccessful Egyptian attempt to establish a cooperative inter-governmental committee (the Undugu, comprising all which share in the

Nile basin), which Kenya and Ethiopia refused to join. Furthermore, in the Nile 2002 conference, held in Addis Ababa in March 1997, Ethiopia refused to recognize the 1959 agreement between Egypt and the Sudan.

Until now Egypt has been relatively safe since the down-stream countries have been too weak politically, economically and militarily to use their advantage over the Nile against Egypt. It should be noted that Egypt has thus far been able to use its military superiority to deter threats to its share of the Nile. Although, at present the situation is relatively contained, as growing future needs are realized an agreement will have to be reached between the states which share the Nile.

The situation with the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is somewhat the reverse of that of the Nile. In this case, a relatively powerful upstream state, Turkey, has the political and military clout and the economic capability of gaining benefits from its riparian position. Although Turkey has considerable water supplies, 40% of the country’s arable land is in southeastern Anatolia, which suffers from a general shortage of water. Thus, in 1983, Turkey inaugurated the South East Anatolia Development Project (GAP in Turkish), an ambitious scheme for utilizing the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, which entails the building of six dams on the Tigris and seven on the Euphrates (including the massive Ataturk Dam). The GAP, if completed, would cause severe water problems for Turkey’s downstream neighbors, Syria and Iraq, especially where the Euphrates is concerned; 90% of its water is supplied in Turkey, while the Tigris gathers close to half of its water in the mountains of northern Iraq. The GAP could potentially reduce Syria’s share of the Euphrates’s waters by 60%, and Iraq’s share by 40%.

So far, however, Iraq and Syria - whose political relations are quite strained - have done little more than issue complaints to the international community about Turkey’s water project. Their protests did serve to halt World Bank funding for the GAP, but failed to deter Turkey from proceeding with the project despite the setback; Turkey paid contractors in local currency. Syria and Iraq have become increasingly alarmed over the GAP project, fearing it would force them to depend on Turkey for much of their water supply. Syria also had its own plans concerning the utilization of the Euphrates, but these may have been precluded by Turkey’s project. Iraq has long been suspicious of both Syria and Turkey due to their developmental plans for the Euphrates. Nevertheless, a combined Arab reaction to Turkey’s project has often been suggested by each of Syria and Iraq. Fear of the GAP escalated when Turkey announced in late 1989 that it would completely cut off the flow of the Euphrates outside its borders for one month (January 1990), in order to begin filling the Ataturk Dam. Turkey’s efforts to allay Syrian and Iraqi fears diplomatically, as well as its announcement that it would compensate by increasing the river’s flow during the two months preceding the cutback, did little to calm the two Arab states. Although Turkey’s project is not yet complete, it is becoming an increasingly unpleasant reality for its riparian neighbors. Syria and Iraq should make efforts to reach a comprehensive agreement about the future of the Tigris and the Euphrates, unless they are willing to risk dire consequences.

The conflicts surrounding the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates rivers arouse just a fraction of the passionate feelings surrounding the waters of the river Jordan. In this case, the conflict is very much a present one, and the threat it poses is not merely potential. The river Jordan’s entire flow of water is 1% of that of the Nile, yet it is a vital water resource for the countries that share it: Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank. The sources and tributaries which feed the river are in all of these states, but Israel is currently in control of most of them. "Israel steals 65% of its water from its Arab neighbors," blared a headline in an Arabic newspaper (Al-Hayat). This charge was based on a report submitted by the Arab Institute for Planning in Kuwait. In fact, the United Nations reports that 67% of Israel’s water resources are located outside the country’s 1948 boundaries, including 35% located in the West Bank and 22% in the Golan Heights. All this water is not, however, entirely from the Jordan and its headwaters; Israel also depends on a number of aquifers, lakes, pumps and wells to fulfill its water needs.

Israel is the only country in the region to have actually used force in securing its water supplies.

In the early 1960s Israeli soldiers stopped a Syrian-Jordanian scheme to divert the river; in later wars against Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, Israel gained military control of vital sections of the headwaters; in the 1970s implicit threats against the King Abdallah canal, which allows Jordan to irrigate its fields and pump water up to Amman, were used against Jordan’s King Hussein. -Economist

The issue of the area’s water allocation is so sensitive that it was pushed to the back of the negotiating table at the peace talks between the Arabs and the Israelis. The 1995 Jordanian-Israeli treaty should increase Jordan’s current share of the river’s water ( including water from the sea of Galilee, where Israel stores supplies from Upper Jordan), but Israel is in control of the implementation. The West Bank and Gaza, which should receive water from the Jordan according to plans drawn in the 1950s, do not, and instead depend on limited supplies from underground aquifers, which are prone to toxic pollution, and whose water has only been kept marginally safe to drink by the Israeli government, due to the presence of a number of Israeli citizens in these areas. The interim agreement between Israel and the Palestinians (made before the current Israeli government came to power) recognized, for the first time, Palestinians’ rights to water from the river Jordan. Though water issues are paramount to both sides, the situation with the river Jordan is largely in Israel’s hands, and how soon a compromise is reached depends on the flow of the Arab-Israeli peace talks.

Though fresh water appears to be scarce in the Arab World, and crises over water may seem imminent in several cases, it is actually doubtful that wars over water will occur, although, as one writer puts it "it has become fashionable to suggest [so]". American hydrologist Robert Ambroggi maintains that "the total quantity of fresh water on the Earth exceeds all conceivable need of the human population". Many of the Middle East’s water problems thus probably stem from the mismanagement of existing water resources. Another source of conflict may be political conflict. Apparent water scarcity can be overcome by proper planning and cooperation between states. However, in the complex political environment of the modern Middle East, such an outcome will not be easy to obtain.

• Delegates should keep in mind the two aspects of the topic and make efforts to pursue both inter-state and national solutions to water scarcity.
• Efforts should be made at reaching innovative solutions to the problem and not limit yourself to previous work. Keep in mind that most of these problems are becoming more and more important and will continue to do so in the future. Thus, solutions to any arising future problems should also be considered.
• Delegates should attempt to set guidelines for bi-lateral, or multilateral, agreements between the riparian states for the future negotiations.
• To effectively help the whole Arab World, it is necessary to develop efficient water management techniques within countries (up dating water management technology would help immensely in this area), and to set guidelines for how countries efficient at this field could share its knowledge and technology with other needy Arab states.

• NOTE: The secretariat recommendations are there to guide your research and help you rack your brain. However, don’t limit yourself to this. As creative people you have the ability to think of solutions un-thought of before. Maybe some of the ideas brought forward in the conference can actually be of use to today’s politicians.

- Al Sharq Al Awsat. 27 March, 1993.

- Al Sharq Al Awsat. 22 March, 1997.

- Feild, Michael. Inside the Arab World. London: John Murray, 1994.

- "Israel steals 65% of its water from its Arab neighbors". Al Hayat. 12 March, 1993.

- Starr, Joyce R. "Water Wars". Foreign Policy 82 (Spring 91) p. 17-36.

- "Water: Flowing Uphill". The Economist 336. 12 Aug. 95 p. 36.