Where green technology clashes with culture

SANAA, Yemen — In a country where goatherds roam the streets of the capital city, it is easy to imagine that progress is slow. The vast majority of the people are farmers and live in highland villages without electricity or water pipes.

But Yemen’s physical environment is changing fast. Experts say that within 15 years, Sanaa could be the first capital city in the world to run out of groundwater. The rest of the country will not be far behind.

Simple modern technologies, like irrigation and rainwater collection systems, could slow the crisis long enough to plan more durable solutions. But water experts say traditions, culture and chaotic governance block efforts to build a sustainable water supply.

And farmers say that the wells just keep sinking deeper — sometimes as much as 65 feet a year.

Ali Athroba, a Yemeni farmer, said his wells are now twice as deep as they were two years ago. Some reach thousands of feet, and produce water hotter than 120 degrees.

"We are worried for the next generation,” he said. “Every year it’s getting worse."

Even modest estimations of climate change, population growth and groundwater depletion point to a bleak future for the poor and dry Arab country of about 23 million people. In parts of Yemen, only a third of the rainwater falls that did 10 years ago, and rainfall patterns have changed so drastically that farmers don’t know when to plant their crops, said Sanaa University water resource specialist, Abdullah Al Numan.

The change in the rainfall distribution causes floods in some areas and droughts in others. Last year, 58 people were killed and 20,000 were forced to flee their homes when an entire year’s worth of rain fell in Hadramout in only a few days.

The population of Yemen has doubled in the past 30 years and is expected to double again before 2030. And as rainwater becomes scarcer and less predictable, the ballooning country increasingly relies on groundwater, which is dropping at an alarming speed.

Water scarcity touches almost every aspect of daily life in Yemen. Women in the countryside trek for miles with 45-pound yellow jerry cans of water on their heads. In the cities, people line up at mosque spigots to fill plastic tubs. Tubular metal trucks carry water to distant dried-out villages and squeeze though neighborhoods in the capital city. Farmers say the price of trucked-in water has tripled in the past four years.

More than half of Yemeni households are not connected to water pipes and about a third of the people don’t have access to clean, safe water, according to the World Bank.

Irrigation technologies like sprinklers or drip systems, which have been around since the 1960s, could have prevented, or at least lessened, the blow of this crisis, said Al Numan. If adopted now, they could cut the nation’s current water usage in half, he said.

But most Yemeni farmers prefer to irrigate the traditional way, by flooding their fields. In the countryside around Sanaa, more than 90 percent of the farmers flood their fields many times a year and about 80 percent use earthen pipes, according to Saleh Al-Dubby, the director of the Sanaa Basin Water Management Project, which is funded by the World Bank. "There will be a very serious problem," he said.

With less rain, and dropping groundwater levels, farmers also dig deeper into their wells. When the wells dry up, they dig more with, or without, a permit. And because the central government has little power in much of the countryside, there is no one to stop it, or even measure exactly how fast the water levels are dropping.

“Our drought is in management,” Al Numan said. New policies, laws or studies will not help, he added. Drilling wells without a permit is already illegal, and modern irrigation is available. What the Yemeni government lacks, he said, is the will or the ability to enforce the law and educate the people about water conservation.

Yahya Al Maleki, a farmer who heads a local water association in Sanaa, said he has tried to convince his neighbors to stop flooding their fields, and trade their earthen pipes for plastic.

“The traditional way is inherited from their ancestors,” he said. “It is difficult to convince them because they have in their minds that the traditional way is better.”

But some farmers say that no one has ever suggested they change their irrigation methods.

Sitting barefoot under grapevines propped up on stone and stick trellises, 18-year-old farmhand Mahdi Wasabi said he floods his boss’s fields about eight times a year, and has only ever seen modern irrigation systems on television. “If you step into the field, your feet go down to here,” he said, pointing to his dusty lower-calf.

International efforts to protect Yemen’s water supply have also failed, according to Ramon Scoble, a water resource specialist for the German development company, GTZ. The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands pour tens of millions of dollars into Yemeni water management, but the problem continues to grow.

"This is the part that staggers me," Scoble said. "It’s almost as though international donors don’t want to see change."

Scoble also said that many locals don’t want change, either. Farmers derail efforts to measure water usage because they fear water regulations will limit their ability to grow, cutting their incomes. The GTZ, which has worked in the Yemeni water sector since 1989, has put about $40 million into water projects in the past four years alone. For all the time and money, he said, the agency doesn’t even know how much water Yemenis use. “It boggles any rational resource management,” he added.

Desalinization plants, improved rainwater collection systems and fixing leaks could offer some respite. But desalinization is expensive, and Yemen, one of the world’s poorest and least developed countries, does not have a history of successful urban planning in the water sector. About 30 percent of Sanaa’s water supply is lost to leaks, illegal drilling and inaccurate metering.

The popularity of qat, a leaf chewed in round wads for its mildly narcotic effects, exacerbates the problem. About 30 or 40 years ago, Yemeni farms depended on rain water, and farmers grew the food that fed the country. But as drilling techniques advanced, farmers started growing cash crops, like qat, bananas and mangos. Qat alone uses more than a third of Yemen’s water supply.

The culture surrounding qat is as much to blame as the plant’s need for large amounts of water, according to Scoble. Most men in Yemen spend hours a day chewing qat. Government offices close for the day at lunch, and officials spend the afternoon chewing and chatting. Productivity is low at every level of society and the immediate and dramatic changes necessary to curb the water crisis will not come from a government that only works a few hours a day, he said.

But water scarcity could destroy the agricultural industry in Yemen, and experts across the water sector predict mass migration, economic upheaval and increased violence if major changes in water management don’t happen soon.

“Will this country get to the point where they say, ‘No, we’ve had enough,’ and they will rebel?” Scoble asked.

The government, occupied with a Shiite rebellion in the north, a secessionist movement in the south, and the growing presence of Al Qaeda in the countryside, has the water crisis on the back burner, he said.

And although these conflicts are not entirely driven by water issues, they are a sign of an increasingly dissatisfied population and dwindling of resources. In late August, one person was killed and three others were injured when riots broke out after water was cut in parts of the port city of Aden.

Increased water scarcity in the future will also increase the country’s instability, according to Johan Kuylenstierna, the chief technical adviser for water issues at U.N. Water. When people get desperate enough, they organize and demand change — sometimes violently, he said. “If you don’t have access to water, it becomes a strategic issue very quickly,” he said.

But many farm workers, like Mahdi, say they do not think sinking wells or soppy fields of qat are signs of worse times to come. About five years ago, his family left its village because of drought. In the mountains of northern Yemen, his village used to water their terrace farms with rainwater, drawn with buckets from a traditional stone well. When the rain stopped falling, the well dried up, and people moved.

Mahdi and his family now work other people’s farms in a rocky valley near the capital city. “I don’t like it, but that’s life,” he said.

And on the neighboring farm, as Yahiya Al-Hubaishi picked through his qat trees for the choicest leaves, he said he did not see water as a problem. He said his well was lower every year, but he was planning to dig deeper.

Hubaishi floods his fields about 13 times a year, he said, and has never considered buying a modern irrigation system. The qat wad in his right cheek grew as he moved from tree to tree, popping leaves into his mouth.

“I am not worried,” he said, “because there is always water.”