Israeli PM's water tech offer to Iranians not news for the BBC - by Hadar Sela

Interestingly, the same BBC which considered the Iranian drought important enough to justify the compilation of a backgrounder only six months ago has not found the offer from a country that is one of the world's leaders in water management technology worthy of a news report.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
15 June '18..

Earlier this year BBC Monitoring produced a backgrounder on a topic the UN has been flagging up for some time. Titled “Iranian drought raises environmental alarm“, the backgrounder – a version of which was also published on the BBC Weather website – explains that:

“The ongoing drought in Iran has raised fears of an environmental disaster, with warnings that the impact to many parts of the country’s ecosystem could lead to severe consequences, such as population displacement and mass migration.

Years of low rainfall, rising temperatures, mismanagement and population growth have led others to warn of a security threat and sandstorms engulfing as much as “a quarter of Iran’s territory”.

“Drying lakes and rivers, declining groundwater resources, land subsidence, water contamination and rationing, agricultural losses, salt and sandstorms, and ecosystem damages are reaching alarming levels in Iran,” said the deputy energy minister for water resources planning, Hedayat Fahmi, in August last year.”

Recently Israel offered to help the Iranian people to combat those long-standing problems.

“In his remarks in a video clip posted on Facebook with Farsi subtitles, Netanyahu began by pouring and sipping a glass of water, detailing his plans to launch a Farsi website explaining how Iranian farmers can recycle their waste water. […]

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Israel's Main Source of Water Faces Dire Shortage

Amiram Cohen
Haaretz
25 August 09

The Water Authority has instructed Mekorot, the national water company, to pump only 132 million cubic meters of water from Lake Kinneret this year - about one quarter of the annual average, sources in the agriculture sector said.

This would be the smallest amount pumped from the Kinneret since the National Water Carrier went into service in 1964.

The Water Authority wants to begin the coming winter with the Kinneret no lower than it was last year at that time. The level of the lake is currently about 45 centimeters lower than it was at this time last year, but it is unlikely it will maintain this level; the Water Authority predicts that the level will fall to 214.87 meters below sea level, lower than the "black line" below which the lake's pumps cannot operate properly.

Meanwhile, the Water Authority has informed farmers that they intend to decrease the water ration to farmers by only 5 million cubic meters, reducing the cutback from 100 million cubic meters to 95 million cubic meters. The allocation refers to the amount of high-quality water available to farmers from three basins: the Kinneret, the Yarkon-Taninim aquifer and the coastal aquifer.

Representatives of the agricultural sector said they were very disappointed by the authority's decision, since they say the water economy is is much better than it was predicted to be, particularly in the Galilee and the Golan Heights.

According to the organizations representing the farmers, the flow volume of the Dan Springs, which provide the Kinneret a good deal of the water channeled to the National Water Carrier, was the highest it has been for the past three years. At the beginning of August, the flow volume was 6.2 cubic meters per second, as opposed to 4.3 cubic meters per second at this time last year.

Farmers also said the reservoirs in the Golan Heights were filled almost to maximum at the end of the winter, and contain 32 million cubic meters of water.

Yoram Tamari, who holds the water portfolio for the Israel Farmers' Federation, said the decision on the cutback was made at the height of last winter, before the heavy rains at the end of February and the beginning of March, which he said led to "dramatic improvement" in the water economy.

According to Tamari, last year's average rainfall, measured at 25 survey stations throughout the country, was 490 millimeters, which according to the Water Authority's own standards, should allow it to reduce the cutback by up to 60 percent.

Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon warned recently that the water cutback will dramatically decrease large-scale cultivation in the north and require the import of raw materials from abroad, resulting in increased unemployment.

Water Authority spokesman Uri Shor said that despite the farmers' problems, a cutback in all sectors of all the water economy was unavoidable, since "we have no guarantee what next winter will be like; it may be as dry as the four that preceded it."
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Syria is Drying Up

If given the opportunity, Syria will ruin our main water source
Guy Bechor
Ynet/Israel Opinion
08.03.09

Syria is experiencing an economic holocaust. There is no other way to describe what the Syrian regime is so much trying to hide. The country is drying up, and no less than 250,000 farmers were forced in the past three years to abandon their land and migrate to the large cities. They live in tents there, completely neglected by the regime. These figures appeared in a special study undertaken by the United Nations and published on the al-Arabiya website.

The immense Euphrates River, Syria’s main source of water, is drying up. The Turks are stopping its water in their territory, so that Syria and Iraq are receiving a declining portion of the water. Within about 10 years, the river is expected to dry up completely outside Turkish territory. Today already, it reaches Syria with contaminated water and therefore its fish, an important source of livelihood, is becoming extinct.

As result of the drought that had been plaguing Syria for several years now, another important Syrian water source, the Aasi (Orontes) River, is drying up as well. Its water is becoming saltier and increasingly contaminated, and its fish are dying off. And without fish, there is no livelihood. Entire villages fed by its waters for hundreds of years are simply being deserted.

Ground water in the country had reached such nadir that it is no longer possible to use the roughly 420,000 illegal wells dug by residents over the years. If there is no water, there is no agriculture; people proceed to leave the village and move to the city. As there is no work there either, the distress is terrible and political pressures builds up.

Many of the farmers leaving their villages are Kurd, which makes the problem an ethnic one. The Kurdish refugees accuse the regime of doing nothing for them. For several years now they have been living in thousands of tents near the big cities without being addressed.

Should Israel pay for Syrian failures?

It turns out that the ruling Baath party is at fault for everything. During the 1960s, the party decided to turn Syria into a grain-exporting state. They viewed it as a victory of the Syrian agrarian revolution. For that reason, they forced the farmers to shift from herding, on semi-arid land, to growing grain. The regime turned a blind eye to the hundreds of thousands of wells that were dug in order to water the grain. Any economist who dared to speak out against this policy was jailed.

Now, with the terrible drought, the grim results are overwhelming this land of 20 million people, half of them farmers. Instead of the 1.9 million tons of grains they expected to produce this year, the farmers managed to supply only 892,000 tons. Ruin in Syrian terms. The implication is that Syria is importing its grains today and has no money.
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