Need to control population......

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By Robert F. Worth: Oct 31, 2009

JAHILIYA, Yemen — More than half of this country’s scarce
water is used to feed an addiction. Even as drought kills
off Yemen’s crops, farmers in villages like this one are
turning increasingly to a thirsty plant called qat, the
leaves of which are chewed every day by most Yemeni men
(& some women) for their mild narcotic effect. The farmers
have little choice: qat is the only way to make a profit.
Meanwhile, the water wells are running dry, & deep, ominous
cracks have begun opening in the parched earth, some of
them hundreds of yards long. “They tell us it’s because
the water table is sinking so fast,” said Muhammad Hamoud
Amer, a worn-looking farmer who has lost two-thirds of his
peach trees to drought in the past two years. “Every year
we have to drill deeper and deeper to get water.”

Across Yemen, the underground water sources that sustain
24 million people are running out, and some areas could be
depleted in just a few years. It is a crisis that threatens
the very survival of this arid, overpopulated country, and
one that could prove deadlier than the better known resur-
gence of Al Qaeda here. Water scarcity afflicts much of
the Middle East, but Yemen’s poverty and lawlessness make
the problem more serious & harder to address, experts say.
The government now supplies water once every 45 days in
some urban areas, and in much of the country there is no
public water supply at all. Meanwhile, the market price of
water has quadrupled in the past four years, pushing more
and more people to drill illegally into rapidly receding
aquifers. “It is a collapse with social, economic and
environmental aspects,” said Abdul Rahman al-Eryani,
Yemen’s minister of water & environment. “We are reaching
a point where we don’t even know if the interventions we
are proposing will save the situation.”

Making matters far worse is the proliferation of qat trees,
which have replaced other crops across much of the country,
taking up a vast and growing share of water, according to
studies by the World Bank. The government has struggled to
limit drilling by qat farmers, but to no effect. The state
has little authority outside the capital, Sana. Already,
the lack of water is fueling tribal conflicts & insurgencies,
Mr. Eryani said. Those conflicts, including a widening armed
rebellion in the north and a violent separatist movement in
the south, in turn make it more difficult to address the
water crisis in an organized way. Many parts of the country
are too dangerous for government engineers or hydrologists
to venture into. Climate change is deepening the problem,
making seasonal rains less reliable and driving up average
temperatures in some areas, said Jochen Renger, a water
resources specialist with the German government’s technical
assistance arm, who has been advising the water ministry for
five years. Unlike some other arid countries in the region,
like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Yemen lacks
the money to invest heavily in desalination plants. Even
wastewater treatment has proved difficult in Yemen. The
plants have been managed poorly, and some clerics have
declared the reuse of wastewater to be a violation of
Islamic principles.

At the root of the water crisis — as with so many of the
ills affecting the Mid East — is rapid population growth,
experts say. The number of Yemenis has quadrupled in the
last half century, and is expected to triple again in the
next 40 years, to about 60 million. In rural areas, people
can often be seen gathering drinking water from cloudy,
stagnant cisterns where animals drink. Even in parts of
Sana, the poor cluster to gather runoff from privately
owned local wells as their wealthier neighbors pay the
equivalent of $10 for a 3,000 liter-truckload of water.
“At least 1,000 people depend on this well,” said Hassan
Yahya al-Khayari, 38, as he stood watching water pour from
a black rubber tube into a tanker truck near his home in
Sana. “But the number of people is rising, and the water
is growing less & less.” For millennia, Yemen preserved
traditions of careful water use. Farmers depended mostly
on rainwater collection and shallow wells. In some areas
they built dams, including the great Marib dam in northern
Yemen, which lasted for more than 1,000 years until it
collapsed in the sixth century A.D.

But traditional agriculture began to fall apart in the
1960s after Yemen was flooded with cheap foreign grain,
which put many farmers out of business. Qat began replacing
food crops, and in the late 1960s, motorized drills began
to proliferate, allowing farmers & villagers to pump water
from underground aquifers much faster than it could be
replaced through natural processes. The number of drills
has only grown since they were outlawed in 2002. Despite
the destructive effects of qat, the Yemeni government
supports it, through diesel subsidies, loans and customs
exemptions, Mr. Eryani said. It is illegal to import qat,
and powerful growers known here as the “qat mafia” have
threatened to shoot down any planes bringing in cheaper
qat from abroad. Still, the water crisis could be eased
substantially through a return to rainwater collection &
better management, Mr. Renger said. Between 20 & 30% of
Yemen’s water is lost through waste, he said, compared
with 7 to 9 percent in Europe.

In Jahiliya & other areas around the capital, the World
Bank is leading a project to change wasteful irrigation
patterns. Mr. Amer, the farmer based here, proudly showed
visitors his efforts to irrigate fruit and tomato fields
using rubber tubes, instead of just funneling it through
earthen ditches that allow most of the water to evaporate
unused. Little hoses spray the crops with water instead
of wastefully soaking them. But he also pointed out two
local wells where the water is dropping at the astonishing
rate of almost 60 feet a year, causing the land to subside.
Nearby, sinkholes in the arid soil of his property are
growing longer and deeper every year. “We have been
suffering for years from this,” he said, gesturing at a
cast-off drill rig that broke after going down too deep
into the earth.

The Yemeni engineers working on the World Bank project
concede they have had tremendous difficulty convincing
other farmers — and even government agencies — to take
their efforts seriously. “There is no coordination with
other parts of the government, even after we explain the
dangers,” said Ali Hassan Awad. “Prosecutors don’t under-
stand that drilling is a serious problem.” Mr. Eryani,
the water minister, takes the long view. Yemen has
suffered ecological crises before and survived. The
collapse of the Marib dam, for instance, led to a famine
that pushed vast numbers of people to migrate abroad, and
their descendants are now scattered across the Middle East.
“But that was before national borders were established,”
Mr. Eryani added. “If we face a similar catastrophe now,
who will allow us to move?”
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