Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of the potential problems with these planned
irrigation projects is that the return waters may
well prove to have a high saline content and so
reduce the quality of the waters of the main stream
itself (Beaumont 1996).
There can be no doubt that the development
of new irrigation projects in Turkey and Syria will
have a very great impact on irrigation in Iraq.
Once the Turkish and Syrian schemes are fully
commissioned in the early years of the twenty-
first century, the volume of water in the River
Euphrates available to Iraq may be only around
5000 million m
3
each year, compared with a figure
of around 30,000 million m
3
in the early 1960s
before the projects along the river began to be
constructed. As a result, Iraq will have to abandon
large areas of land that it was once able to irrigate.
This is bound to cause severe social problems, as
many of the villagers along the Euphrates will no
longer be able to earn their livelihood by irrigated
agriculture.
The situation on the River Nile is not yet as
critical as on the Tigris-Euphrates, although
potentially it could become even worse. The main
user of the water from the river at the present day
is Egypt, which uses approximately 55,000 million
m
3
each year out of a total of around 84,000
million m
3
(Howell and Man 1990). This
represents almost two-thirds of the flow of the
river. However, none of the flow of the river is
actually generated within Egypt. In recent years
upstream countries, like Ethiopia, in which the
majority of the precipitation that feeds the river
occurs, are now beginning to plan for major
irrigation schemes of their own. If these come into
fruition, then the main sufferer will be Egypt and
its irrigated agriculture. Given the large
population of Egypt and its rapid growth, this will
undoubtedly cause many problems.
THE FUTURE OF IRRIGATION
One of the key issues to consider is whether
irrigated agriculture is a sustainable activity or
merely represents a mining of resources (van
Figure 12.7
New irrigated
areas in the Euphrates basin
of Turkey.
