Read at : Google Alert – desertification
http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=ia&ID=IA53709
Water Crisis in Iraq: The Growing Danger of Desertification
By: Dr. Nimrod Raphaeli *
“Neither Syria nor Iraq can lay claim to Turkey‘s rivers any more than Ankara could claim their oil. This is a matter of sovereignty. We have a right to do anything we like. The water resources are Turkey‘s, the oil resources are theirs. We don’t say we share their oil resources and they cannot say they share out water resources.”
-former Turkish president Suleyman Demirel [1]
“Watercourse States shall, in utilizing an international watercourse in their Territories, take all appropriate measures to prevent the causing of Significant Harm to other Watercourse States.” [2]
Introduction
The land we know today as Iraq was, in ancient times, called Mesopotamia, or the land of the two rivers – a reference to the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, which fed the region with water, allowing the growth of a great civilization, and which have supplied Iraq with water even to the present day. Both rivers are fed by snowpack and rainfall in eastern Turkey and northwest Iran, and they discharge peaks in March and May, too late for winter crops and too early for summer crops. The Euphrates, 1,730 miles long, flows through Syria while the Tigris, 1,150 miles long, comes down from Turkey into Iraq. There is also a network of smaller rivers from Iran, some of which feed into the Tigris. The combined annual flow of the two major rivers was about 80 billion cubic meters. However, there is an extensive system of diversions and irrigation canals dating back centuries, with more than a dozen major reservoir projects, a few on the main river systems but most on tributaries.
Iraq accuses Turkey, and to a lesser extent Syria, of sharply reducing the Euphrates’ water flow by placing on it hydroelectric dams that have restricted water flow, damaging the Iraqi agricultural sector already suffering from decades of war, sanctions, and neglect It accuses Iran of diverting major Tigris tributaries that has cut the flow of water in the other major river.
According to Iraqi minister of water resources Dr. Abdul Latif Jamal Rashid, the estimated annual Iraq needs are approximately 50 billion cubic meters, 60% to originate from the Tigris and the remainder from the Euphrates. The country’s need for water is estimated to grow to 77 billion cubic meters by 2015, at a time when water flows are expected to decline to 43 billion cubic meters annually. [3]
The growing need for water by the riparian countries makes the fair distribution of this finite source a potential source of conflict, if not wars. In Iraq, the ever growing shortage of water is threatening a fertile land with desertification.
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