Drying out, drinking up
Mapping the Middle East's water use
The Middle East and North Africa is home to eight of the ten most water stressed countries in the world, though you wouldn’t know it from how most consume water. The bone-dry countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council have no permanent rivers, but they do have a flourishing ecosystem of fountains and water parks. In Iraq, it’s common to see people hosing down the pavement amid searing summer heat, even as taps run dry across much of the country.
Such anecdotal evidence is backed up by data from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which helps visualize the tension between meager resources and high consumption.
This data surely has gaps and imprecisions. In many countries, consumption is likely underreported due to weak monitoring or high levels of water theft. But the overall picture is clear, and familiar to the region’s residents. Water may be scarce, but it’s also dirt cheap or even free—at least as long as it’s coming out of taps, rivers, and aquifers, rather than from private vendors who step in when public supply fails.
This paradox goes back to the mid-twentieth century, when post-colonial regimes built their legitimacy on the rapid expansion of public services. Cheap water, in particular, anchored emerging social compacts. This bargain endured even as consumption rose and supply shrank, nourishing a culture of abundance that endures across much of the region today. Nowhere is this clearer than in oil-rich Gulf states, where rates of municipal consumption—that is, use by households, public institutions, and businesses like malls and hotels—rival or exceed that in water-rich nations.
The Gulf’s lavish lifestyle hinges on world-leading desalination of seawater. This sustains the illusion of plenty, but is also extravagantly expensive and polluting. Some Gulf states have sought to slow waste and recover costs by increasing water prices, especially for non-nationals. For now, though, it’s a drop in the bucket.
Region-wide, however, the bigger culprit is farming. Several of the Arab world’s most populous states—including Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia—pour huge volumes of water into agriculture that doesn’t feed their populations. Big agribusinesses tend to favor cash crops for export, including water-intensive products like berries and avocados. Smaller farmers struggle to survive, while also losing water to leaky infrastructure and outdated flood irrigation.
This problem, too, has roots in twentieth century state-building. Flush with a mix of oil wealth and Cold War aid, nationalist Arab regimes flexed their muscles through hydraulic megaprojects: from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Aswan High Dam to Syria’s Lake Assad, Saddam Hussein’s Mosul Dam, and Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Great Man-Made River. Improved irrigation infrastructure, combined with agricultural lending and the spread of diesel pumps, enabled a shift from rainfed farming toward year-round cultivation—typically through flood irrigation. Those water-intensive methods have endured, even in places where infrastructure is crumbling and state support drying up.
For all they invested in plumbing scarce water, the same governments did little to build modern, diversified economies. Indeed, even as the region’s oil wealth fed industrial economies in Europe, Asia, and North America, back home it mostly fed swollen bureaucracies and kleptocratic elites.
That’s not to say industrialization would solve the region’s environmental or economic woes. Just take Lebanon or Iraq, whose comparatively high rates of industrial water use have mostly enriched elites and despoiled the earth. But industry’s absence reflects a broader sticking point: The region’s economies remain both wasteful and unproductive, exporting raw materials and importing everything else. This imbalance relates, in part, to a long history of colonization. But it also reflects the failure of today’s regimes, and their foreign backers, to harness the region’s resources to the benefit of its people. That includes oil and gas, of course, but also water, soil, and sun. As populations bulge and water supply shrinks, the need for a new approach is more urgent than ever.
Alex Simon is Synaps' research director. Monica Basbous is a consultant with Synaps.
