[LINK] "Saudi's struggle for water"

[rfmcdonald]

In the United Arab Emirates newspaper The National, Graeme Wood has an interesting review essay describing how Saudi Arabia's leaders have seen the power of the Saudi state as being most readily expressed in terms of its ability to make water resources available--and to expend them.

Researchers recently announced that what was thought to be the most arid place known to man might actually be wet enough to support life. Just one small truckload of its soil, they say, can support the drinking, cooking, and showering needs of a person for a day, as long as you are willing to spend the energy needed to wring the water out of the dirt that conceals it.

This surprisingly wet place is, of course, the moon. Residents of the Arabian Peninsula are in some ways in a more precarious situation. There is not a single river or lake in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the factories that clean salt water consume massive amounts of energy, even though they are barely enough to meet the needs of the population. If these desalination plants were to shut down, Saudi Arabia would begin to die of thirst within days.

Toby Craig Jones's new book about the kingdom examines the Saudi state's relationship to water and oil, the twin resources that are its blessing and its curse (or, according to some, its two curses). Jones argues that Saudi ruling classes hold their inherently fragile state together through a strict and bold programme that manages these two substances. In Saudi Arabia, more so than in almost any other place on earth, the business of the state is the control of nature, because to control nature is to control people.

When the Saudi kingdom was established in the early 1930s, the royal family's highest priority was to establish its authority to the fragmented tribes outside the central desert of the Nejd. Jones leaves little doubt that the Sauds saw oil and water as the glue that would keep the diverse new country together and make it rich and strong. Other countries have been founded on the idea that the land must be subdued and conquered - the United States' notion of manifest destiny is perhaps the most famous case - but only the Saudi project combined a massive scale with the awesome power of modern engineering.

[. . .]

The bold and profligate use of the water has been no less amazing than the manner of its acquisition. It is as if the goal was not merely to control nature but to defy it. To the Saudis this meant not only supplying its citizens with drinking water but also inviting them, with massive financial incentives, to use the water to produce water-intensive crops. Dates, which Jones says are consumed in some parts of Saudi at a rate of one and a half kilograms per person per day, were just the beginning. During the 25-year period that ended in 2005, the government spent 18 per cent of all its oil revenues on subsidising other, less geographically appropriate agriculture, to the extent that a country unsuited for cultivating anything but date palms briefly became the world's sixth-largest exporter of wheat. This policy, which aimed to diversify the country's food supply, is being phased out, but it gives a measure of the eagerness of the Saudis to think big, with blithe disregard for the natural order.

Go, read.