By Andrew Raven Cover Story Customs Unraveled Almost everyone has welcomed new government reforms that slash tariff rates, simplify customs procedures and prepare the country for wider integration into the global economy. While on paper the reforms will cost the government LE 3 billion, analysts predict the new rates could actually be a boon to the government by unbinding business. Looming Concerns If the textile sector is any indication, the new government will have to prove its customs reforms look as good in practice as they do on paper CUSTOMS UNRAVELED Almost everyone has welcomed new government reforms that slash tariff rates, simplify customs procedures and prepare the country for wider integration into the global economy. While on paper the reforms will cost the government LE 3 billion, analysts predict the new rates could actually be a boon to the government by unbinding business.

By Andrew Raven

E very year China’s Gobi Desert expands several thousand square kilometers, chewing up massive tracts of once-prime grazing land on a march toward Beijing.

In the southwestern United States, scientists warn the overburdened Colorado River system, which supports some of the country’s biggest cities, is heading for collapse.

Meanwhile, water riots are becoming common in the drought-stricken Yemeni capital of Sana’a, which is poised to be the Middle East’s first major city to run dry in recent history.

These are all symptoms of a world running short on water.

Unchecked population growth, wasteful irrigation practices and pollution are pushing many of the world’s rivers, lakes and aquifers to the brink, experts say.

In the next two decades, half the planet, an expected 3.9 billion people, could face shortages. If the trend is not reversed, experts warn that the worldwide food supply will plummet, driving up prices and potentially sparking mass migrations and war. The situation will be most acute in the Middle East and North Africa, where the US Agency for International Development (USAID) expects all 20 countries to face water shortfalls.

It was this looming crisis that drove former World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin to utter, in 1995, an oft-repeated phrase.

“Many of the wars this century were about oil,” said the Giza-born Serageldin. “But those of the next century will be over water.”

While the intervening 15 years have not seen a major water-related conflict, experts believe it could just be a matter of time.

In March, the World Economic Forum released a report that said shortages will soon tear into the global economic system, affecting half the planet’s population by 2030.

“Water is the gossamer that links the web of food, energy, climate, economic growth and human security challenges the world faces over the next two decades,” the report read. “We simply cannot manage water in the future in the same way we have in the past or the economic web will collapse.”

The study said by 2025 a shortage of water will dramatically cut agricultural yields; the reduction could be roughly the same as losing the entire grain crop of India and the US.

Meanwhile, the glaciers of the Himalayas and Tibet, which feed seven of the world’s great rivers and support 2 billion people, are threatened by warming global temperatures and could disappear within the century.

Other parts of the world face similar problems. A United Nations-sponsored report released earlier this year predicted that as resources become scarce, conflicts could erupt in the Middle East, Haiti, Sri Lanka and Colombia, among other places.

But war is not inevitable, say some experts. Dr. Anders Jagerskog, a specialist in water-related diplomacy, points out that there has not been a major war over water in recent history. He says the countries of the Middle East, where most conflicts are expected to take place, have more pressing issues on the political agenda.

While it may not have been a prime mover of armies, water has been at least a tangential issue in several conflicts and regional spats.

Much of Israel’s water comes from a massive aquifer under the West Bank, one reason critics say Tel Aviv has pushed the expansion of settlements. Meanwhile, tensions persist between Turkey and its downstream neighbors Syria and Iraq, who have railed against Ankara’s network of dams along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

But perhaps the most volatile area is the Jordan River, where four countries and the Palestinian Territories draw on the waterway’s increasingly taxed resources.

Sharif El Musa, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo who specializes in water issues, does not think there will be war in the near future. But the Middle East’s rapidly growing population and the scarcity of water resources could alter that equation.

“I don’t have enough foresight to tell you what will happen in 50 years,” he says. “Water has always been relatively scarce on the Arabian Peninsula, but people have survived. Just not in these numbers.”

One wildcard in the equation is climate change. Scientists are still not exactly sure how rising global temperatures will affect things like rainfall and the flow of rivers like the Nile.

“There were models that the Nile flow could rise by 30% or fall by 70%, so this is a big gray area,” says El Musa.

Jagerskog, a consultant to the ongoing nine-country Nile water-sharing talks, says there are ways Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries can stretch their water supplies in the face of that uncertainty. They include: cutting down on the amount of water used in agriculture; re-using waste water; passing and enforcing water efficiency standards; and desalinating sea water for industrial use.

Given the looming shortfalls, it appears as though many countries are prepared to embrace some of those strategies, he says.

“Perhaps one could wish it to be a quicker transformation,” he says. “But there is an increasing realization that [solutions] are needed.”

The World Economic Forum, though, questions whether there is enough time and political will to properly address water scarcity. It likens the water crisis to the financial upheaval that gripped the world this year and last. It said water is priced artificially low, like mortgages once war, which has lead to reckless speculation.

“We have enjoyed a series of regional water bubbles to support economic growth over the last 50 years, especially in agriculture. We are now on the verge of a water bankruptcy in many places with no way of paying back the debt.”

W hile the planet is brimming with water — it covers two-thirds of the globe — only a tiny portion is available for human consumption.

Freshwater accounts for just over 3% of world reserves, and most of that is locked in the polar ice caps. Nearly all the rest is inaccessible, either stashed away in mountaintop glaciers or buried deep within the ground. That means just .01% of all the world’s water is in the form of rivers, lakes and easy-to-access groundwater.

The pressure on those systems is growing like never before. Every year, the planet’s population increases by about 80 million, and human demand for water doubles every 21 years. The end result: By 2030, half of the world’s population could be facing shortages, according to a report from the World Economic Forum.

Running on Empty

Perhaps the poster child for over-exploitation, experts warn the region’s heavily taxed rivers and shrinking aquifers will not be able to support America’s desert metropolises indefinitely.

At the center of three conflicts since 1950, perhaps no river in the Middle East is more strategically important. Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories all draw on its increasingly taxed resources.

Tensions are rising between the Egypt-Sudan duopoly and several upstream countries who want more water for irrigation schemes and hydro-electric projects. Egypt, however, has said any attempt to divert the Nile is tantamount to an act of war.

Drought-prone Namibia is eyeing plans to build a 300km pipeline that would siphon water from Africa’s fourth-longest river. Downstream neighbor Bostwana, also plagued by water shortages, fiercely opposes the plan.

A prodigious dam-building drive by Turkey has cut flows along both rivers, angering downstream neighbors Syria and Iraq.

Once the world’s fourth largest inland body of water, it has all but disappeared because of Soviet-era irrigation schemes that shunted water from its tributaries to the desert.

A severe drought this summer forced city officials to cut water supplies to hundreds of thousands of households, many in the city’s teeming slums. It was just one of several water-related crises in the world’s second most populous country.

Large parts of the country suffered through six straight years of drought before rains returned in 2008. The drought devastated the country’s food bowl, stoked forest fires and forced Australians to siphon more water from their dwindling underground supplies. bt