Water Could Fuel Future Conflicts in the Middle East
According to a new report published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the USA, the real wild card for political and social unrest in the Middle East over the next 20 years is not war, terrorism or revolution ... but water.
Conventional security threats dominate public debate and government thinking, but water is the true game-changer in Middle Eastern politics.
Scholarly work on water has often focussed on shared rivers as a potential cause of war between countries. But countries in the Middle East have not gone to war over their rivers, and diplomats have been successful in keeping tensions to a minimum. Instead, finite supplies of underground water within national borders pose a more immediate and strategically consequential challenge.
Groundwater has fed the agriculture that many regional leaders have used to cement political loyalties. Its potential exhaustion threatens existing political balances.
A new report entitled 'Clear Gold' describes how water is part of the social contract in Middle Eastern countries. Along with subsidized food and fuel, governments provide cheap or even free water in order to ensure the consent of the governed.
But when subsidized commodities have been cut in the Middle East, instability has often followed.
Water's own role in prompting unrest has so far been relatively limited, but that record is unlikely to hold. Water has no substitutes, and while cheap in its natural state, water is expensive to process and transport.
Future water scarcity will be much more permanent than past shortages, and the techniques governments have used in responding to past disturbances may not be enough. The Middle East's water problem grew out of its successes. The 'green revolution' that swept the region in the 1980s and 1990s made it possible for countries to sustain agriculture and feed growing populations, and high levels of agriculture investment continue today.