Where green technology clashes with culture

In Yemen, traditions and chaotic governance block efforts to build a sustainable water supply.

Heather MurdockNovember 26, 2009 12:28Updated May 30, 2010 12:13

Farmers work in their farm in Yemen, May 10, 2007. Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Arab world and farmers suffer from a lack of water in many areas. (Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)

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.