Resource wars and the Middle East
Phil Hearse
Imperialism has always involved the theft of resources. Julius Caesar said that after his conquest of Gaul, of the 11 million inhabitants, three million had been killed and one million taken into slavery – land, food and slaves were the key resources that fuelled the Empire. Western capitalism’s industrial revolution was based on its own theft of millions of slaves from West Africa and precious metals from South America, the latter involving the biggest genocide in human history.
As the guardians of modern capitalism face the prospect of growing environmental crisis, their resource needs are very clear. Resource conflicts in the modern world will revolve around:
· Energy, especially oil and gas
· Food
· Water
· Land
· Precious metals and rare earths, vital for the electronics industries and modern weapons systems.
Few if any of the latter category of key raw materials are to be found in the Middle East or North Africa. Resource conflicts however involve all the others.
Perhaps the most pressing crisis for the people of the region is water. According to Deborah Amos:
“The Middle East is facing its worst drought in decades. For three summers, the annual rains have failed to come. Farmland has dried up across the region in Iraq, Syria, southeast Turkey and Lebanon….Experts say the climate warming in the Fertile Crescent, the area of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, is contributing to the water shortage and helping to create a new phenomenon – water refugees….More than 160 villages are abandoned in Syria alone. According to a United Nations report on the drought, 800,000 people have lost their livelihood. Hundreds of thousands left once-fertile land that turned to dust and pitched tens near the big cities, looking for any kind of work.” [nps 7 January 2010
If the current drought represents long-term climate change and means that the Middle East is going to be further desertified, then evidently the food security of the region, and hence its ability to support a growing population, will be stretched to breaking point. It eventually means millions of climate change refugees or a radical change in the forms of water use and conservation, which in turn means a radical overhaul of agriculture, which in turn probably means major political changes (see below).
The drought is the general background to the water disputes between states and between the Palestinians and Israelis. There are two major inter-statal water disputes, that between Syria and Iraq on the one hand and Turkey on the other over the Tigris and Euphrates, and that between Egypt and the other states in the Nile basin.
Turkey is always trying to assert its power regionally and one weapon is its control of the Euphrates and Tigris which both rise within its borders. The Euphrates which goes through Syria before entering Iraq is dammed by the massive Ataturk dam in south-east Turkey. It takes more than 50% of the river flow. One thing is symbolic. Saddam Hussein drained the southern Iraq marshes in an attempt to punish them for the alleged role in the uprisings that concluded the first Iraq war. In 2003, the marshes were symbolically re-flooded, but now they have dried up again because of the lack of water from the Euphrates.
The conflict over the waters of the Nile concerns the long-standing agreements between the Nile basin nations. Egypt is entitled to more than 50% of the Nile water and this is too much according to countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Sudan. Ninety-five per cent of Egypt’s water comes directly from the Nile, and issue is fuelled by the country’s skyrocketing population, currently 80 million, which make it reluctant to cede any of its extraction rights under the 1929 and 1959 agreements.
In fact the flows of the Nile into Egypt are already lessening, after Ethiopia dammed the river in four places.
Egypt is under a two pronged attack. On the one hand the flows from the Nile are declining, on the other the whole of the Nile delta is under attack from rising sea levels. The Mediterranean has risen by more than a foot in a century, itself likely caused by global warming.
The rising water has already crept into aquifers and lapped across fields of crops, turning them into marshland. According to Jim Maceda:
“’It’s terrifying,’ said farmer Mohamed Helawany as he pruned his few surviving guava plants. ‘We’ve built barriers with wood and reeds, but the water keeps coming on the plants and kills them’….
“Some scientists predict that, based on current data, the sea will rise another three feet in about 30 years. (Hydrologist Dr Mamdouh) Hamza translated that projection into flesh-and-blood reality. ‘It will mean losing at least a quarter, perhaps 40 percent of our delta. It’s not only agriculture, it’s roads, it’s railways, hospitals, schools, banks, government buildings - it will be an economic disaster.’”
According to Maceda, Egypt has always been open that a threat to its water supplies from the Nile will be a causus belli, and Egypt is much more militarily powerful than its southern neighbours. Sudan, immediately to the south, has sold 30 million acres of commercial land to China for farming, and this will require irrigation waters of at least 180bn litres a year. Major conflict over the Nile’s water is looming.
As anyone who has followed the conflict in any sort of detail knows, water is a key point in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Through its occupation and military might, Israel controls most of the water available in Palestine. One recent report says:
“Of the water available from the West Bank aquifers, Israel uses 73%, West Bank Palestinians use 17% and illegal Jewish settlers use 10%.
Three million West Bank Palestinians use only 250 million cubic metres per year (83 cubic metres per Palestinian per year) while six million Israelis enjoy the use of 1,954 cubic metres (333 cubic metres per years), which means each Israeli consumes as much water as four Palestinians. Israeli settlers are allocated 1,450 cubic metres per person per year.” (Palestine Monitor)
Israel also consumes the vast majority of the extracted water from the river Jordan, despite only 3% of the river falling within its pre-1967 borders. Palestinians have no access to this water. Many Palestinian villages now have to rely on water delivered by tankers, and some families spend up to 40% of their income on water....
Full article here.
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