By David Shelby, USINFO (U.S. Department of State) Staff
Writer
United States helps Mideast
countries negotiate water resource management
Washington – During the 1990s, there was
a common belief that the arid conditions in the Middle East would place water at
the center of future wars in that region, but U.S. officials helping to
coordinate water resource management in the region report that water is more
often a source of cooperation than conflict.
Chuck Lawson, senior adviser for science and
technology in the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Near East Affairs, worked
closely with Israelis and Palestinians as the parties sorted through water
management issues in the context of the peace process during the 1990s.
Speaking to reporters in Washington April 16, he said he found that "we and the
parties themselves have been able to use water to cooperate rather than actually
fight over it."
He said water remains a disputed political issue,
"but on a practical level, the Palestinians and Israelis have been working
together for years just to be able to provide water to their people." He
said Palestinian and Israeli water officials realize that water is scarce and
that if they stop cooperating they would harm their own citizens.
"So for instance in the second Intifada, between 2000
and roughly 2005, when there was a lot of violence on the ground, the water
officials on both sides – Israeli and Palestinian water authorities – continued
to work together to try to provide water for their people," he said.
This cooperation was the fruit of a long-term process
to build confidence. Lawson said U.S. officials worked with Israeli,
Palestinian and Jordanian water officials from the outset of the peace talks to
build an understanding that they all faced similar problems and should work
together to allocate water resources from the Jordan River, Lake Tiberius and
the Israeli and West Bank aquifers.
Lawson speculated that a future peace deal between
Israelis and Palestinians could open additional possibilities for cooperation
such as the development of new water resources through jointly operated
desalination facilities.
COOPERATION BENEFITS BROADER MIDDLE
EAST
Aaron Salzberg, who manages transboundary water
issues in the State Department's Bureau of Oceans and Environmental Science,
said Israel and the Palestinian Territories are not the only parts of the Middle
East that benefit from cooperation in water resource management.
"The reality is there are few regions in the world
that would benefit as much from regional cooperation as the Nile basin
countries," Salzberg said. Ten countries share the Nile waters. Nine
of those countries formed the Nile Basin Initiative in 1999 to coordinate
management of the waters for the 180 million people living along the river and
its tributaries.
Egypt is a primary consumer of Nile water, but all
the river's waters originate elsewhere, primarily in the Ethiopian and Ugandan
highlands. Salzberg said Egypt's efforts to store water in Lake Nasser
result in a 25 percent water loss through evaporation. He said it would be
far more efficient to store water in the cooler Ethiopian highlands, leaving
more water for everyone to use.
But even without adjusting water-storage
arrangements, Salzberg said regional cooperation in water management benefits
Egypt by promoting economic development throughout the basin and creating trade
opportunities.
Lawson pointed out that the Nile Basin Initiative
already has grown from mere water management to cover a host of regional
development issues including agriculture, energy and trade. "This Nile Basin
Initiative has gotten people to look not just at the river itself and the water
flowing through it, but the broader context of how they can all benefit from
regional cooperation in a whole range of areas," he said.
Salzberg said common international practice offers
conflicting principles for assigning water rights to countries, one looking at
historical patterns of usage and another looking at where the water falls.
He said the only way to reconcile these issues is through negotiation, and this
is where the United States can help.
"Often in the first phase of any transboundary
process, the parties are actually trying to understand what's going on:
Where is the water? Who has the water? When does the water
come? When does it flow? What is the quality of the water?
… What is the state of the ecosystems being supported by the water?
Who needs the water for what purposes? … These are very technical
questions," he said.
Salzberg said the United States can offer its
technical support through geological surveys, environmental studies,
agricultural assessments and engineering reports to help the parties understand
the parameters of the issues they need to address. He said, however, that
the United States never makes any attempt to determine what the division of
water rights should be, leaving that issue to negotiation between the
parties.
Agriculture is the single largest drain on water
resources, using 75 percent to 90 percent of water in the Middle East, according
to Salzberg. He said countries could free up tremendous water resources by
using more efficient irrigation systems, eliminating subsidies on agricultural
water and importing water-intensive agricultural products rather than producing
them locally.
(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International
Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
