This paper demonstrates how the wrong strategy, such as food self-sufficiency in water stressed Syria, misallocated the country’s scarce resources and ruined its water endowment. It summarizes the findings in my research at the School of Oriental and African Studies, published in 2006 under the title: Experiments in Achieving Water and Food Self-Sufficiency in the Middle East: The Consequences of Contrasting Endowments, Ideologies, and Investment Policies in Saudi Arabia and Syria. The work draws heavily on the data in a World Bank Report on Syria’s irrigation sector dated August 6, 2001.
I will start by describing the failure of the Asads’ regime in two areas: Irrigation and the Tabqa Dam project. I will examine the causes behind the failure. I will venture two recommendations to save Syria’s water endowment and offer ideas on solving the domestic household water hardship in Damascus.
The Syrian Government: A bad farmer – irrigation
The Syrian Government invested in irrigation projects between 1981 and 2000 a total of S£173 billion, equivalent to US$16 billion, at the prevailing official exchange rates. The financial return in 2000 from crops grown on 138,000 hectares of reclaimed and irrigated lands during that period (wheat, cotton, fruit, vegetables…) was a net loss of US$150 millions.
More seriously, over-extraction of the non-renewable or partially renewable aquifers caused the water balance in five of the country’s seven water basins, including Damascus and Aleppo, to become negative. Unless stopped, continued over-extraction will further deplete and degrade the quality of what is left of the water. Unless stopped, irrigated lands and crops would be abandoned, investments written off, and migration from rural to urban centres would make the migration levels seen since the 1960s pale into insignificance.
The Syrian Government: A bad investor – the Tabqa Dam
The Euphrates River has an average flow of 1,050 m3 per second, or 33 billion cubic meters (m3) per annum. The construction of the Tabqa Dam was highly risky because five years before it was started in 1968, Turkey had started in 1963, its own infrastructure work on the Keban Dam, a part of the giant GAP Project of 22 dams and 19 power stations in the Southeastern Anatolia region of Eastern Turkey.
Syria must have known of the effects of the Keban Dam on reducing the flow of water downstream before it started building the Tabqa because in 1964, Syria and Iraq discussed with Turkey the effects of the Keban on reducing the water flow without reaching an agreement. Notwithstanding, however, with technical and financial help from the Soviet Union, Syria proceeded with the Tabqa, hailing it as a historic achievement.
Syria and Turkey signed a protocol on July 17, 1987. It reduced the flow to Syria and Iraq by almost 50%, to 500 m3 per second, or 15.8 billion m3 per annum. Until 2025, actual flows, however, often dropped to 200-250 m3 per second. On April 17, 1989, Syria and Iraq signed a memorandum, whereby Syria committed to give 58% of all incoming waters to Iraq.
GAP reduced Syria’s age-old share of the Euphrates River to ~6.6 billion m3 per annum (after Iraq’s share). While returns from drainage add ~1 billion m3, evaporation from Lake Asad loses ~1.6 billion m3, leaving Syria with ~6 billion m3 in surface water from the Euphrates River annually, excluding groundwater extraction and rainfall.
Completed in 1973, the Tabqa Dam was supposed to increase by the year 2000 the irrigated surface in the Euphrates Basin by 640,000 hectares. However, by 2000, only 124,000 hectares were developed. The Basin’s soil was found to be salt-affected and drainage-poor. Gypsum in the soil caused the irrigation networks to collapse. The 2001 World Bank Report identified 43% of the Euphrates Basin as having drainage problems or potential to develop problems.
Tabqa was designed to generate ~880 MW from 8 turbines. Until 1983, the power station operated at 65% of capacity. In 1986, it operated at 30% to 40% of capacity because of the low water level in Lake Asad.
GAP turned the Euphrates River into a political tool of Ankara. Insufficient water and politics have rendered the idea of pipelining Euphrates waters to Aleppo and Damascus to alleviate their severe drinking and household water shortages a mirage. Alternative solutions need to be found. I will offer one for Damascus later in this paper.
Reasons behind the failures
Hafiz Asad must have been either ignorant or oblivious to the effect of the Keban Dam and the larger GAP project on reducing the Euphrates’ water flows to Syria and Iraq. Also, he must have been either ignorant or oblivious to the salt and drainage problems in the Euphrates Basin and to the water loss to evaporation.
Asad led an illegitimate military dictatorship. He banned political parties (aside from Ba’ath), free press, egalitarian non-governmental organizations, and ethical environmental groups. He surrounded himself by subservient yes men. The Asad regime was a non-representative, non-participatory, and non-transparent autocracy. It suffered from siege mentality. It lacked safe political processes and environmental understanding. It was impossible to introduce a balancing economic or environmental perspective into Syria’s water policy, or combine the country’s natural, human, and financial capitals to achieve long-term economic security. White elephant projects, like the Tabqa Dam were packaged with nationalistic slogans as judicious and patriotic strategies against imperialism.
Food is an encapsulation of water—virtual water. For example, 140 litres of water are embedded in a cup of coffee, 1,000 litres in a litre of milk, 1,300 litres in a kilogram of wheat, 2,700 litres in a T-shirt, 3,900 litres in a kg of chicken, 15,500 litres in a kg of beef. Annually, an individual requires 1 m3 of water for drinking, between 50 m3 and 100 m3 for domestic chores like washing and cleaning, and 1,000 m3 for food. Typically, a society utilizes 90% of its water in agriculture and 10% in homes and drinking.
Annually, Syria’s population of about 25 million people requires about 25 billion m3 of water embedded in foodstuffs, 2.5 billion m3 of water for domestic chores, and 25 million m3 for drinking.
Syria’s total available water is 15 billion m3 per annum, 13 billion m3 from surface and underground aquifers plus 2 billion m3 from rainfall. To feed itself, Syria needs 25 billion m3 of virtual water. The gap, around 10 billion m3, is imported. This gap will grow as Syria’s population grows. An instinctive solution would be to start preaching birth control and the virtues of small families.
Asad was indifferent to Syria’s growing population and insufficient water resources. He equated food self-sufficiency with national security. In his land of fear, there was no dissent against the mendacity of food independence.
Recommendations to save Syria’s water endowment
I will venture two recommendations to save Syria’s water endowment for future generations:
1. A rate of return on investment criteria should apply to allocating Syria’s scarce resources. Investments in new water projects should be justified on a rate of return basis, with full costing of water that ensures maintaining the quantity and quality of the aquifers and accounting for the negative and positive externalities of production and consumption.
A rate of return criterion makes water extraction a central factor in the cost of production, a departure from ancient attitudes developed as a result of poverty and age-old customary practices that expect water to be free of charge. However, new realism should now be recognized.
Other approaches to scarce resource allocation are inefficient. Ethical, ideological, and emotional bias typically influence decisionmakers, often driven by narrow personal interests. Such debates could be particularly intense when dealing with water issues, which impinge on poor sections of the population.
2. Syria should emphasize manufacturing industries. These use far less water than agriculture. Syria needs to export low-water-using manufactured goods to earn the foreign currencies to import high-water using foodstuffs.
Syria should help the private sector develop the capacity to turn natural resources into exportable manufactured products. For example, cotton, a major crop, should be exported as shirts, jeans, socks, towels, and curtains. Cotton seeds should be exported as oil and animal feed. Likewise, Syria’s vast reserves of high-quality phosphate should be exported as fertilizers, additives, and industrial and chemical products.
Thoughts on a potential local solution to a local water problem – the case of Damascus
In 1998, the Greater Damascus region had a total of 25,483 water wells: a mere 3,315 were licensed, while a huge 87% (22,168) were non-licensed. This compares to 47% non-licensed water wells in Syria overall.
The reason for this breath-taking level of lawlessness in Damascus is mainly due to one factor: There were many more government security officers and Ba’th party members in Damascus than in the other cities. Their modest official salaries were too low to justify risking their lives for an illegitimate dictator. So, they were allowed to enrich themselves illegally with impunity. Lacking in investment opportunity abroad, many of them hired the farmers and became absentee or weekend farmers in the suburbs of Damascus. It was a way to launder their ill-gotten wealth and earn income from the sale of fruits and vegetable.
In 1997, total water use in the Greater Damascus region was 1.35 billion m3 as follows:
– 920 million m3 (of which 608 million m3 from illegal wells) to irrigate 62,000 hectares.
– 390 million m3 for domestic uses.
– 40 million m3 for industrial uses.
The volume of renewable water from surface and groundwater was estimated to be 900 million m3/annum, leaving the Damascus Barada/Awaj basin’s water balance with a deficit in the order of 450 million m3 per annum, winch is currently met by over-abstraction from the local aquifers.
To ensure the future water sustainability for all users in the Damascus region, the first priority is to restore the annual water balance between demand and supply. Subject to refinement by experts, this will require a net annual reduction in water abstraction in the order of 450 million m3. This figure can essentially be achieved by progressively closing non-licensed wells and preventing further drilling while progressively increasing supplies to the much larger number of citizens who currently lack adequate domestic supplies.
While the overall reduction in irrigation abstraction is key to the objective of for sustainable use, at the margin, ensuring that all return flows from domestic and industrial use are treated and made available for reuse, together with investment to minimize water leakage and waste will help achieve the objective of aquifer stabilization.
Cutting off the illegal extraction will present a formidable political challenge. Such a major step will cause huge opposition from the landowners of the wells, let alone the farmers who are employed on the land. But, in promoting and implementing this solution, a major disaster may be averted.
A grim warning here, please. Due in large part to exhaustion of local aquifers, a severe water crisis in Tehran prompted the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, recently to warn that the Capital may become uninhabitable, potentially forcing its relocation. This might ultimately become the future of Damascus in the absence of a strong political intervention soon.