31 March 2011
ROMA - Overcome by worries and daily fears, amidst anti-regime demonstrations and bloody repressions, Sana'a, one of the world's most ancient and suggestive cities, is doomed.
Six years from now, according to a report by Washington's Centre for strategic and international studies, it will completely run out of water. Yemen's capital city consumes four times the rainwater that flows into its underground reserves in a region that is no longer the fertile Roman Arabia Felix, but a chain of dry mountains. The aquifers are drying up.
In 2017, according to the experts of the US think-tank, no more water will flow from the taps and the 1.5 million citizens will be forced to leave. It is an announced catastrophe that at the same time is faced with fatalism, because there is no time and there are no economic and political resources to deal with the situation.
The 'wise men' of the US Centre claim that the only solutions involve payment of water consumption or nuclear power stations on the Red Sea that would cost at least 2.5 billion dollars each to desalinise the sea water and transport it to the mountains at a height of 1,700 metres. Unlikely solutions, as admitted by the experts, for the poorest Country in the Middle East, where people live on 900 dollars per year and the demand for water already represents one fifth of the world average.
Without taking into account the current political situation, caught between a regime on its last legs and popular uprisings, between tribal rivalries verging on civil war and the shadow of the al Qaeda terrorist threat. In this scenario, death by thirst in Sana's could have incalculable consequences.
The lack of water is not a drama that only affects Yemen, it affects the entire Middle Eastern and Arab region. Another research paper presented in Brussels in recent weeks by 'Blue peace' reports that between 1960 and 2010 the flow of rivers that run in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan dropped from 50 to 90%. The next waves of the revolt, according to the survey, could derive from the region's growing water crisis, where blue gold is becoming increasingly rare.
However the situation in Yemen is of particular gravity, according to website Terrasanta.net, which specialises in the area's problems. The population is equal to 24 million people and in 17 years it will double because it has the world's second highest demographic growth rate. Up to 1960 Sana's citizens lived exclusively in the old city, the large medina of old and tasteful buildings enclosed by the clay walls. An architectural prodigy that Unesco included in the world heritage list.
Today Sana'a has grown chaotically and without structure, and its population has quadrupled. As in other Arab nations, the so-called 'green revolution' of the '80s and '90s, which saw the growth of local agricultural production to feed the people, drained the water reserves. Also disconcerting is the fact that 40% of Yemen's available water is still allocated to growing Khat, the plant whose leaves are chewed to experience numbness and euphoria. A national drug that nobody, in a nation tested by violence and misery, apparently wants to give up.
Source: ANSAmed.
Add your comment
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
