Water security in the Middle East and the Mediterranean

Prof Tony Allan

SOAS, University of London, [email protected]


Abstract


The purpose of the paper will be to establish the nature of the water deficit facing policy makers in the region. It will be shown that all the political economies of the region have the capacity to supply their municipal and industrial water needs from their own water resources. By 1970 almost all the economies of the region had become water deficit economies in terms of food self-sufficiency. It will be shown that policy makers have been able to solve their water deficit problem in the global 'problemshed' rather in their local 'watersheds'. Almost 30 per cent of the Middle East and North Africa's annual water needs are accessed via virtual water. Virtual water is the water embedded in key traded commodities such as wheat. It requires 1000 tones of water to raise a tonne of wheat. The price of wheat has been falling on world markets for at least a century. Wheat is has been available on the world market at half its production cost during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Virtual water provides an economically invisible and politically silent solution to the region's water problem. The chapter will also address the issue of whether there will be sufficient freshwater, part of it traded, as 'virtual water', to meet a doubled global population. The paper will deploy social, economic and political theory to identify trends in water policy in the industrialised semi-arid North and in the less-industrialised semi-arid South. It will be emphasised that water scarcity is both and environmental as well as a socially constructed notion. Remedies to environmental scarcity are available to political economies with the social adaptive capacity to trade their way to water 'entitlement'.

An unsolicited poem which indicates the theoretical contexts: Is there a water problem in the Middle East and North Africa? Another case of the blind people and the elephant?

Accessing global soil moisture as traded virtual water. And on the dangers of scientific analysis by outsiders visiting communities and polities

Is there a problem?

Water is a problem say some
Others say it's not
Water is in short supply say some
Others insist it's not

Like the blind men and the Elephant
It depends on what you touch;
But even more important still
Is who you are and what you vouch

Useful and un-useful science
Water is very short
The hydrologist insists
Short for whom?
Ask the knowing economists?
For they detect virtual water
In food embedded
And wondrous subsidies
For food importers added

Politics

Peoples and governments are blind
Alien scientists insist
As dangerous water fantasies exist
And in beliefs for millennia persist

Wise politicians know that they
Must resist the simple (scientific) truths
And by subscribing to pervasive water lies
Remain in power along with (Their) essential truths
[Allusion to Goleman 1997]

Impaired interpretation
Why not use Our theories say social theorists
They explain all these mysteries
But (alien) scientists are blind fools
Devoted to familiar narrowing tools.
'It's far, far better to be blind
Knowing only what impairment finds'.

The answer

Because the population too fast grows
The answer to the question posed
is 'Yes there's a regional deficit'
But for the water stressed
A solution also does exist
Through trading to 'entitlement'. [An allusion to Sen. 1981]

Tony Allan, 1997, SOAS, [email protected]