UN Expert: In Mideast's Future, Water More Inflammatory Than Oil

By Ian Williams

"The next few decades will show that water is a much more inflammatory issue" than oil, according to Dr. Mohamed Nour of the United Nations Development Program. That is just one of the reasons he met with diplomats, scientists and international agencies in Damascus in July to discuss what is perhaps the first, and possibly the most important, pan-Arab initiative since the Gulf war. It is the establishment of the Center for Environment and Development in the Arab Region and Europe (CEDARE).

The organization will be housed in an old palace in the embassy district of Cairo, backed by $5.5 million from the United Nations Development Program and matching funds from the Gulf-based Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development. Egypt has donated the premises and pledged the local currency equivalent of more than $3 million towards center operating costs.

The project could scarcely be more timely. The Gulf war showed just how vulnerable the environment of the Middle East can be, as land, water and air all suffered from military action and wanton destruction.

The region shares more than a language and a faith. Its climate is 93 percent arid. As a result, almost every Arab country faces a water crisis. Hence Dr. Nour's apocalyptic warning, reinforced by Israel's insatiable thirst, which seems to add a new dimension to the old Zionist dream of "from the Nile to the Euphrates."

However, it is not only in Israel that existing water is not always used in the most economical fashion. Irrigated lands throughout the Middle East are vulnerable to water logging and salination because of overuse, poor drainage and high evaporation. In most Middle East countries, just as in California, farmers get water at subsidized rates, competing for supplies with growing cities and industries.

While water shortages are at the root of the Arab world's environmental problems, there are many other existing and potential dangers. Desertification poses a major problem. North Africa has lost 2 million hectares of scarce agricultural land in the last 25 years to various forms of erosion.

That can accelerate the move from the countryside to the towns. By the turn of the century, well over half of all Arabs will live in cities, most of which will not have adequate water, sewage, and transport infrastructure. Amman and Casablanca are more densely populated than New York, while Cairo, with 30,000 citizens per square kilometer, has three times New York's population density.

In the cities, the air will be polluted by industries, many of which may have fled EC health and environmental regulations to set up, like the maquiladores on the Mexican/US border, in less rigorously regulated countries. In Cairo, one cement plant alone was found to be emitting 10,000 tons of dust a month into the air. Already 7 Arab countries are among the world's top 14 per capita greenhouse gas producers.

And while some Arab countries draw great benefit from their oil reserves, post Gulf war environmental catastrophes revealed just how few resources are available in the region to cope with disaster in the production and transport of oil.

The region shares more than a language and a faith.

While stereotypes associate the Middle East with ships of the desert, the Arab countries have more than 21,000 kilometers of coastline. Most are on the world's busiest shipping routes, especially for oil tankers. Ships cleaning bilges release the equivalent of 17 Exxon Valdez oil spills a year into the Mediterranean, and yet the Arab world has little or no capacity for early warning of slicks, let alone for dealing with them.

Oil is not the only problem. Arab cities discharge 90 percent of their sewage untreated into the Mediterranean, which also gets some 60,000 tons of detergents, 100 tons of mercury, and 12,000 tons of phenols a year.

Based on facts like these, the five key targets for CEDARE's work will be: freshwater use, management and conservation; land degradation and desertification; marine pollution; urbanization; and industrialization. The chosen weapons include a variety of high technology tools. The center will house a computer data base and network, enabling experts and institutions in the area to pool information, and, possibly, a remote sensing laboratory, able to examine satellite data in order to monitor, and if possible forestall, problems.

With such an awesome array of "challenges," as problems are called in UN-speak, what could CEDARE do? Dr. Nour says that simply having the ability to think about problems and their solutions on a pan-Arab basis allows governments and environmentalists to realize the scale of potential disaster.

A primary function of CEDARE will be to act as a think tank for the region. The UN conference on the environment next year in Brazil, and the preparatory meetings on the Global Warming Convention, are just some manifestations of the importance of "ecodiplomacy." CEDARE should be able to pull together Arab expertise to make a considered contribution to the international agreements which will be hammered out.

Mobilizing Expertise

On a purely regional scale, many international funding agencies now insist on Environmental Impact Assessments before authorizing projects. Hitherto, this has often involved bringing in experts from outside, who are more expensive, and less likely to understand local sensitivities. CEDARE will seek to mobilize the expertise already available in the region, especially in water conservation.

For example, in Jordan, some wadis (dry washes or valleys), are being dammed to trap rainfall in order to recharge underground water supplies, while municipal wastewater is being stored in others for use in agriculture.

Oman has a climate like California's. There is very little rain, but frequent mists come from the sea. A UNDP-supported project has discovered that a single olive tree can condense 60,000 liters of water a year into collection tanks underneath its branches. Morocco is experimenting with the use of fish to help purify water, while providing protein to the villages.

Combining the politics and technology of water, many Arab scientists confessed admiration for Israeli technology in the field, while deploring what they saw as the state's rapacity. One Lebanese claimed that the Israelis had shelled his compatriots working on the River Hasbani near the Israeli occupied zone in south Lebanon. (It is widely assumed that Israel also is tapping Lebanon's Litani River from that zone.)

However, the most pragmatic solution to the problems was offered by a British consultant, Richard Middleton, who told the Conference that, in fact, the best thing Arabs could do was save water.

Rather than capital intensive projects to tap new supplies, like Turkey's suggested "peace pipeline" to the Arab world, he suggests more efficient use of existing supplies, and a variety of low technology changes including a more rational pricing policy. Although governments keep water charges low "to help the poor," he points out that the poor do not benefit. The revenue from charges in the more affluent parts of the cities does not maintain the existing system, let alone pay for its extension to the shanty towns and slums where people have to pay high prices to water vendors.

Irrational pricing policies reduce the incentive to stop waste, so that Amman, for example, suffering chronic water shortages in summer, loses 50 percent of its supply to "wastage," leaks or unauthorized connections. "No commercial organization would tolerate this degree of waste," Middleton comments. "But these aren't commercial organizations."

In a similar vein, Arab planners tend to insist on West European standards of water supply when, in the bidonvilles, the problem is not to supply piped water to every home, but to supply sufficient clean water in whatever form. Singlestory shantytowns don't need 35 meter pressure to provide enough water for fire fighting in high buildings.

If water is to be used for cropping, alternatives are also possible. "Waste water is ideal for irrigation since it also contains nutrients," Middleton suggests. "It can also be mixed with saline drainage water from irrigated fields to grow crops like duckweed on salinated land. " Duckweed, he points out, is 40 percent protein, and is an ideal chicken or fishfood, thus transforming wastewater from a sanitation problem to an agricultural asset.

New Members and Old Resolutions

Four new states will be admitted to the UN in September: the two Koreas, the Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia. That means that the move to repeal the "Zionism is Racism" resolution has probably gained three extra votes in the General Assembly. However, the prospect of a Middle East peace conference will likely keep it off the agenda. There is no precedent for repealing a GA resolution, and despite Israeli pressure the US administration will not want to risk it unless it is sure of a reasonable margin of success.

It would be very embarrassing for the Arab allies of the US to discuss the issue before the peace conference. They would either have to accede to American pressure before any Israeli concessions, or disagree publicly and meet at the conference table with a state they had just reiterated was racist. If the repeal were tabled, then there would be strong support for a move to defer the issue until peace has been achieved.

Similar pressures impelled the shelving of the Arabs' proposed Security Council resolution on settlements in the occupied territories. "It was tabled, but now all the concerned parties do not want to push it until the peace talks are over," said one Arab diplomat, who added pessimistically, "but I can't see them being successful."

Obstacles in Western Sahara

Meanwhile, Western Sahara provides a foretaste of the type of obstacles which an international peace settlement could meet. Faced with internal resistance, King Hassan of Morocco explained on August 20 that he had agreed to a referendum as long ago as 1981 so as to avoid one being imposed and run solely by the UN. Indeed he refers to the position of another "Arab country" whose sovereignty had been effectively stripped away by the international community.

Despite his confident proclamations of the outcome as restating the "Moroccanness" of the territory, his government has been putting obstacles in the way of the UN team and then castigating it for its delay in completing the census of voters. In addition to the 74,000 Saharans counted in the 1974 census, Morocco has submitted another 120,000 names a rather large margin of statistical error for any census.

At the end of August, Morocco was claiming to be adhering to the peace process, but refusing entry to Johannes Manz, the head of the UN team. King Hassan's speech could be interpreted as preparing Moroccans for a possible defeat which could then be blamed upon the UN.

Ian Williams is a British journalist based at the United Nations.