Saudis battle to save water
Saudi Arabia, Science, 7/31/1997

The advertisement shows a veiled woman bathing her baby while water gushes out of taps into an overflowing basin. Suddenly the water flow stops and the child is left with soap all over its face.

"We made from water every living thing," an old man in a flowing white robe says, reciting Islam's holy book, the Koran.

His message is clear: "Please don't waste water."

This advertisement being screened on Saudi television is a part of a campaign launched in July to get the 18 million people living in the desert state to cut water use.

King Fahd is behind the drive. In late July he urged citizens to save water and said his government was revising laws regulating consumption. "It is a religious as well as a national and development duty," he said.

But economists and water experts say the authorities have a tough task ahead. For years there has been no incentive to save water, which is cheap at around 0.08 US dollars per cubic meter, thanks to generous state subsidies.

Water use per person in the Saudi Arabia is said to be higher than in other countries at the same stage along the development road.

Some officials have put per-capita daily consumption at 400 liters, versus an international average of about 200 liters.

Residents say most house and apartment rents are inclusive of water charges, or a fixed fee is levied by the building owner once a year. Others say they never received water bills.

Domestic users alone are not to be blame for excess water use, as they consume only 10 percent of total annual demand of around 18 billion cubic meters the main culprits are farmers.

"Agricultural continues to consume almost 90 percent of water from all sources, and the expansion in grain production has been heavily dependent on non-renewable ground water in most areas," says the kingdom's five year development plan to the year 2000.

The plan targets a cut in water use to 17.5 billion cubic meters by the end of the century from 1994's 18.2 billion cubic meters.

It also calls for a decline in the use of non-renewable ground water to 13 billion cubic meters from about 14.8 billion cubic meters.

More than 80 percent of the kingdom's water is non-renewable ground water. Around 14 percent is surface and shallow ground water and four percent is desalinated in the 24 plants which Saudi Arabia says are the world's biggest. Less than one percent is reclaimed or treated water.

Since the 1980's, Saudi Arabia has been growing many crops unsuitable to its arid conditions, economists in Riyadh say.

Government help in drilling wells and cheap rates until 1995 for diesel used to drive water pumps were an incentive to grow crops that otherwise would probably have been imported.

In the early 1990's, Saudi Arabia was growing four million tons of wheat a year.

This has fallen to about 1.3 million now because of cuts in state grain prices. But this had led, ironically, to higher output of some even more water-intensive crops.

"Production of alfalfa, which consumes more water than wheat and barely, has increased," Hussien Mousa of the US Agricultural Trade Office in Riyadh said.

"The government is planning to reduce forage production because Saudi Arabia is exporting a lot of alfalfa to neighboring countries, which is like exporting water," he said.

Please add a link on your webiste pointing to ArabicNews.com and bookmark ArabicNews.com & subscribe to our daily email news bulletin.

Search