BY HASSAN Y. YASSIN There was a time not long ago when all we heard about was impending oil shortages and their devastating effect on the world economy. Then for a year or two we fretted about food scarcity and rapidly rising commodity prices. While our economy or food supplies have not collapsed, these are all serious predicaments that we will continue to face in the future. It is important to have raised awareness about our habits of consumption and our disregard for the environment and its limited and fragile resources, both of which must be drastically transformed. As we have become more aware of these problems in Saudi Arabia, we have finally started to look at our water predicament more honestly. As we all know, water is our most essential resource; as human beings we cannot go for more than a few days without it, and we depend on it entirely to grow or rear our food. As one of the driest countries in the world, Saudi Arabia faces immense challenges to supply a rapidly growing population with enough water. At a time when even developed countries with large amounts of renewable water supplies – such as the United States – are starting to push the alert button about losing arable land to desertification and making efforts to reduce water waste, Saudi Arabia needs to make even greater efforts, as dramatic sandstorms remind us on a regular basis. Lester Brown, in The World on Edge tells us that “desertification now affects 25 percent of the earth's land area. And it threatens the livelihoods of more than 1 billion people.” Until now we have not taken water shortages very seriously in our country, yet we are breaking almost every record in water usage and waste. Thirty years of a misguided wheat self-sufficiency policy depleted aquifers that will take millions of years to regenerate. Fortunately we have phased out that policy and have opted for far less costly (both financially and environmentally) wheat imports. Our water use as a country is double the per capita global average, and the head of the National Water Company Louay Al-Musallam notes that, with 286 liters per person per day, we trail only the United States and Canada in per capita water consumption. Our population has grown from three million in 1950 to 26 million and is set to pass 30 million soon. Needless to say, for a country with renewable water resources at one-tenth the level regarded as water scarcity, this is absolutely unsustainable. Most shockingly, while Global Water Intelligence estimates the costs of desalinated water at an immense $6 per cubic meter, Saudi consumers pay the lowest price in the world, at $0.03 per cubic meter. At such prices the incentive to curb water usage is simply not there. The National Water Company's Al-Musallam says that the only way to control usage of water is to increase the cost to the consumer. While both our government and private enterprise have led initiatives to reduce the amount of water that is wasted on a daily basis, we should look first and foremost at agriculture, which represents almost 90 percent of Saudi Arabia's water use, yet yields less than three percent of GDP according to the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency. This is clearly a huge waste of a precious resource that we must aim to drastically reduce, not just by a few percent per year as currently planned, but by a bold 50 percent over the next five years. Local agriculture in many places is sustainable through rainfall and runoff, but we must stop wasting such huge amounts of precious water on agricultural projects that make no economic or ecological sense. Our other main focus should be in changing the approach to precious water resources of every Saudi individual. At schools and in the media we must educate people on the importance and the costly nature of the water we use every day. None of this will work of course without actually removing subsidies and making people pay for the water they use. This could start with a certain number of liters of water for free, and increasing prices for increased usage, particularly for the wasteful quantities of water used for watering grass lawns, filling swimming pools and washing fleets of cars after every sandstorm. Measures can go from simple water-conserving activities for children, to television shows raising awareness on water usage, and use of state-of-the-art AstroTurf instead of grass in parks. In a country where oil is cheaper than water we should really be stimulating an added-value industry using petrochemicals to make perfectly acceptable replacement for grass and even trees, instead of wasting countless gallons of water per person each day to water them. In fact, the government should be subsidizing such industries instead of subsidizing water and it should be encouraging Saudis not to waste increasing quantities of precious water. Can you imagine the labor force we can employ by creating environmentally friendly plastic greens. By ending subsidies that today still encourage wasteful agriculture, irrigation and the watering of vanity gardens, we must finally accept the reality that we live in one of the world's driest countries and that water is a resource we must appreciate, use wisely and maintain for the sake of our own subsistence and that of future generations. (The writer is a political and petroleum consultant and can be reached at [email protected]) __
