There is a water crisis looming for Yemen. They are running out of water very quickly. All of the fresh water in Yemen is from underground or rainwater, there are no rivers or lakes here. At the current rate of consumption, it is estimated that Sana’a (the capital) will be out of water by 2015. The recent headline in the Yemen Times states that increased urbanization is threatening Yemen’s water supply. Of course when you look at the accompanying chart, it is shown that agriculture is responsible for consuming 93% of Yemen’s water. Of that, 30%-40% is quat production. To make matters worse, Yemen’s irrigation methods (when they exist at all) are really inefficient. It is estimated that they waste 40%-60% of the water they use in farming.
The obvious thing to do is to work on increasing irrigation efficiency. If you can get back 45% of your water supply by making changes in agriculture, you would think they would do it. That doesn’t seem to be the way that officials are thinking though. They are really playing up the water drying up doomsday scenario. I’m not really sure what their plan is. Some officials have come right out and said that people will simply have to live somewhere else. While that isn’t what people want to hear, it certainly makes a lot of sense. Since the government has zero control over who has access to water and how much they use (everyone just drills wells), even my favorite method of rationing, by price, won’t work. The folks on the government might have already figured out that it doesn’t matter what they do, people will keep using it until its gone.
A not so obvious reason why there is so much water used for agriculture is what the government has done to promote it. Years ago (I’m not sure of the exact date), the president banned (or at least made incredibly expensive) the importation of fruits and vegetables. This had the desired effect of kick starting the agriculture industry here in Yemen. They boast that Yemen now is an exporter of fruits and vegetables and an important part of the economy. No one seems to have wondered why they weren’t in the past… It turns out that agriculture isn’t as well suited to Yemen as it is to other places in the world, you have to use a lot of very precious water here to get crops. If Yemen had allowed the importation of fruits and vegetables, the local growers would not use nearly as much water and they might have been able to stave off the current crisis. I have a feeling that when the water shortages hit the hardest, agriculture will naturally feel the brunt of it. The water will be too brackish to water crops and they will have to go back to importing their food. In the end, it will have the same effect as if the agriculture industry had not been propped up for all of these years, but it will be devastating to the economy and there will be mass migrations and refugee problems. The moral? Governments should not screw around with artificially protecting/subsidizing industries, REALLY bad things can happen…