By Aydar R. Aganin, Director of Rusya al-Yaum News Channel

Water is the most widespread natural product in the world. It covers more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, but only 1% of its global resources, which account for 2.4 billion km3, is fresh water. Even so, theoretically, this could be enough for a population five or ten times the present number living on Earth. The question, therefore, is not the availability of water, but its distribution over the globe. Water resources (further only fresh water is meant) are spread unevenly across the globe, and the Middle East and Northern Africa are the least supplied with it. In that part of the world water has always been an issue causing clashes between tribes, regions and states.

The main aspect of the water problem in this area is the transboundary nature of water sources: the most significant rivers, like the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, Jordan and Yarmuk, flow through more than one country. Their origins lie in non-Arab lands, which makes water distribution doubly complicated.

With water essential for living, both for human consumption and food production, its availability or lack becomes a matter of national security. So contradictions occasionally flaring up between, for example, Israel and its neighbours, Turkey and Syria and Iraq, Egypt and Sudan and Ethiopia, make the military and political escalation of these disputes very likely. 

Eventually, water will join oil as a conflict-generating resource in the Middle East. The water situation is worsening; its quota per person in the region is now below 1,000 m3 a year, and will fall to 600 m3 in 2050, compared with a global standard of 1,700 m3. This is an average figure. In some water-poor countries, like Jordan, this indicator does not surpass 500 m3 a year. In the opinion of some experts, the H2O formula will soon become a formula for peace in the Middle East.

The situation in the Arab-Israeli conflict zone is most alarming, because the parties to the conflict are divided not only by water-related, but also by political and military contradictions. This concerns the Israeli-Syrian water “knot” on Golan Heights, water arteries in Southern Lebanon, and deposit waters on the Western bank of the Jordan River. Although Israel and Jordan have signed a peace treaty, water distribution still has rough edges. Even regular Syrian-Jordanian disagreements on the water resources in the Jordan-Yarmuk basin are the result of Syria and Israel having no peace treaty.

A solution could be all-embracing cooperation in water supplies, with regions having the least reserves (population numbers should also be taken into account) able to receive it from areas which are as yet far from a water crisis. Such an approach could help build hydro-schemes enabling water to be accumulated and transported across borders. The only condition is an end to the military and political conflict and a higher level of confidence and cooperation.