Development & Aid, Europe, Headlines, Middle East & North Africa

Cooperation Strategic To Protect Tigris and Euphrates

Timothy Spence

BRUSSELS, Mar 15 2011 (IPS) - On a dusty street in the north-eastern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniya one recent day, an elderly man sold heaps of tomatoes, fruits and other fresh produce from a makeshift trolley.

But the vendor lamented that the fruits and vegetables no longer come from the once-prolific valleys of Iraq’s self-governing Kurdish region, nor fertile regions further south.

Most of his goods are trucked in from Turkey and Iran, Massoud explains, handing over a bag of oranges to a visitor. “We had wars, we had Saddam, and now we have no rain,” said Massoud, who did not want to share his real name with the customer.

Although the brief wet season is just beginning, much of northern Iraq has endured several years of drought, compounding water problems that stem from climate change, migration, a growing population and declining water flows in the country’s most important rivers — the Tigris and Euphrates.

Faced with a potentially catastrophic shortage of fresh water, Iraq and the other nations that share the Tigris and Euphrates, emanating in eastern Turkey, must strengthen efforts to protect the waterways, according to a new report. Such cooperation, like the rains, has been in short supply.

“The deficit of water resources is a direct function of the deficit of political wisdom, deficit of mutual trust, and the deficit of a desire for peace and governance,” Sundeep Waslekar, president of the Mumbai-based Strategic Foresight Group, told members of the European Parliament in Brussels on Tuesday in presenting the findings of a report on water challenges in the Middle East.

“The Blue Peace: Rethinking Middle East Water” report, released in advance of the World Water Day on March 22, urges heightened regional cooperation across the Middle East amid warnings that the region’s fresh water is under mounting stress.

Since antiquity, the Tigris and Euphrates have formed a crescent of fertile farmland. But the rivers are among the most dammed in the world — the rivers and two main tributaries are dammed a combined 12 times before they reach Iraq’s border. The streams are increasingly tapped for human, agricultural and industrial uses. Declining river flows have been accompanied by rising soil salinity and desertification.

Turkey, Syria and Iraq for years traded blame for the waterways’ decline. Iraq has complained that Turkey’s dams reduce downstream supplies, while Turkey has accused the Iraqis of squandering their resources. Syria’s dependence on the Euphrates for irrigation, coupled with a lingering drought, has also affected Iraq’s water access.

“We need to overcome this mindset of turning the problem into kind of a simple description, which is essentially a political exercise,” Waslekar told IPS by telephone before presenting the report in Brussels. “Iraqis will say that the greatest problem is the dams in Turkey, and Turkey will like to say the greatest problem is the mismanagement in Iraq. But the truth is never one-sided like that.”

The situation is starting to change. All three countries are taking steps to share data and to improve cooperation, and there have been several ministerial-level meetings on water in the past two years.

Still, Waslekar contends that more leadership is needed from the top, including the creation of a regional cooperation council backed by treaties.

Besides raising alarms about the Tigris and Euphrates basins, the Strategic Foresight Group report urges Middle East nations to work together on protecting the Jordan and El-Kabir rivers, as well as the Dead Sea and Lake Tiberias, or Sea of Galilee.

The report calls for improving irrigation practices, more integrated management of river basins and — in the longer term — joint desalination plants to ease drinking water problems.

It also proposes declaring Tiberias, adjacent to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, a “regional commons” jointly managed by Syria and Israel, and the revival of plans for Turkey to export water to the Jordan Valley from the Manavgat River.

In Iraq, water adds to a host of concerns about security and stability. The country’s weak federal state and disputes between Baghdad and the self-governing Kurdistan region — along with Sulaimaniya, it includes Erbil and Dahuk — hampers infrastructure management and planning. The two sides cannot agree on sharing of oil resources, political authority, and territorial demarcation.

In January, officials in the northern oil-producing city of Kirkuk complained that Kurdish authorities had reduced the water supplies it gets from the Dokan reservoir, Iraq’s second largest, to dangerously low levels. Kurdish leaders, who claim Kirkuk as part of their territory, say the reservoir has still not recovered from a severe 2007-2009 drought.

The prolonged dry spell left the country with half its normal rainfall during the rainy season, normally from March to May. According to the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), some 50 percent of cropland in the northern regions of Ninewa, Salah al-Din, Kirkuk and Erbil saw significantly lower yields. Livestock perished.

One negotiator who shuttled between Syria, Turkey and Iraq from 1996 to 2002 trying to encourage a multilateral water dialogue says that while the nations’ increasing cooperation is a good sign, it is “not sufficient. They have to take bold steps.”

The former negotiator, Jon Martin Trondalen of the Geneva-based Compass Foundation that specialises in resolving water disputes, also has concerns about Iraq’s ability to manage water on a national scale.

“If they internally begin to increase the polarisation of water allocation, they are potentially heading towards a water-management disaster,” Trondalen told IPS in a telephone interview. “There is only one solution for Iraq, and that is to coordinate their effort and not polarise this.”

Experts say it is not too late for countries like Iraq to stabilise water supplies through a combination of domestic conservation, water-saving irrigation technology, pollution control, and more trans-boundary water diplomacy. Technical cooperation in the Tigris and Euphrates basins collapsed in the 1980s.

Globally, scores of multinational councils have been formed to resolve disputes along rivers such as the Amazon, Mekong, Nile, Rio Grande, Danube, Indus and Central Asia’s Amu Darya and Syr Darya. Angola, Namibia and Botswana have taken steps to coordinate policies along the Okavango River.

Yet even with heightened regional cooperation, the prognosis for Iraq is not good. The country’s infrastructure has suffered under decades of neglect, and most Iraqis — including those in the more stable Kurdish region — endure chronic water and electricity shortages. Salinity levels are rising, nurtured by the water-intense irrigation needs of arid farmlands.