From oasis to mirage: the aquifers that won't replenish.

LIKE THE PROVERBIAL CASTLES BUILT ON SAND, THE ECONOMIES OF TWO COUNTRIES - AND PART OF A THIRD - ARE BASED ON THE EXTRAVAGANT USE OF NON-RENEWABLE FOSSIL WATER. BUT POLITICAL LEADERS DON'T SEEM PARTICULARLY CONCERNED ABOUT WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN THE WATER IS GONE.

On August 29, 1991, Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi secured his place in history. Standing in northern Libya beside a concrete pipe four meters in diameter - large enough to drive an 18-wheel truck through, with room to spare - he opened a valve that brought water gushing on a nine-day, 7 50 kilometer cross-country journey from the southern desert. With ceremonial flourish, he inaugurated the first phase of his Great Man-made River Project, a $25 billion plan to move massive quantities of water from southern aquifers to the populated north. The intent was to bring relief to industries and cities squeezed by water scarcity, and to make the Libyan desert bloom. Historians, Qaddafi must have reflected, would undoubtedly remember him as the leader who brought water - and prosperity - to Libya.

But Qaddafi's place in history will not likely be the one he imagined. Future generations will judge that hot August day as the moment when the Libyan economy lurched sharply in the direction of unsustainability. The world's largest civil engineering project could cost the country ten percent of its oil revenues and prompt the import of millions of farm laborers into a desert country already living beyond its natural means.

More significantly, the pipeline will chain Libya's economic future to a natural resource that is destined to disappear. The Great Man-made River is sucking from a depletable font known as a fossil aquifer - a body of water deep under the desert that is not replenished by rainfall. Formed 10,000 years ago before North Africa became a desert, the aquifer is massive, but nonrenewable. As a source of insurance water, and used sparingly, the aquifer has immense value to a desert-bound people, allowing them time to explore options for long-term survival in an arid environment. But when set as a cornerstone of the economy, the resource creates a dangerous illusion of plenty, with tragic consequences as it is depleted or becomes too contaminated for use.

Pursuit of short-term prosperity at the expense of groundwater sustainability is not unique to Libya. In Saudi Arabia and the United States, large fossil aquifers, along with renewable aquifers that are pumped beyond their rates of replenishment, have become the sinking foundations of whole regional economies. In each of these three cases, the disappearing water is being aggressively tapped for agricultural irrigation, turning arid land magically green. The story of these three fossil aquifers constitutes a kind of fable, not just about foolish behavior, but about the universal temptation to seek short-term solutions at the expense of long-term health.

GOLDEN GRAIN: THE SAUDI CASE

Like its oil, Saudi Arabia's water wealth is hidden. The country has no perennial rivers or lakes, and little rainfall. In a nation whose capital receives one-tenth the precipitation of Caracas, Chicago, or Istanbul, and where summer daytime temperatures average over 37 degrees C (100 degrees F) in the shade, it is no surprise that surviving stocks of water are found chiefly underground.

What may be surprising is the sheer volume of groundwater in this desert kingdom. Nearly 2,000 billion cubic meters of water - more than three times the volume of Lake Erie - are held in the aquifers beneath Saudi Arabia. They provide some 88 percent of the country's water - including about 80 percent of its agricultural irrigation and 50 percent of its urban supply. In villages, towns, and even small cities, virtually all the water comes from wells.

Some of these underground supplies, known as alluvial aquifers, are renewed appreciably by rainfall. But they constitute less than ten percent of the country's groundwater capacity, and their rates of replenishment are far below current levels of water use in Saudi Arabia. Renewable aquifer water, along with desalinated water and re-used wastewater, currently meet only about a third of Saudi water needs.

So the shortfall is met with "fossil" groundwater - stocks trapped during the last Ice Age, 15,000 to 30,000 years ago, in pebble-filled cavities so deep that little of today's rainfall can reach them. These enormous subterranean vessels, containing three-fourths of its total water supply, are nonrenewable.

Dependence on nonrenewable water leads, of course, to a declining water balance. With the country's water use expected to jump by more than 50 percent in the next 15 years, aquifer mining will accelerate, and the precious resource - more vital than the country's oil - will rush headlong toward depletion within a century. But the squeeze will be felt much sooner: water becomes more expensive, and often more contaminated, as it is pumped, leaving part of the water stock economically or environmentally unviable. The bottom line is that the largest fonts of Saudi Arabia's most vital natural resource are steadily disappearing.

The impending collision between rising consumption and falling supplies might not loom so intractably, if the country's consumption were more carefully managed. But this is a kingdom where water consumption defers to other goals that, while laudable in themselves, have promoted irrational use of precious water stocks. In its drive to reduce food imports, the Saudi government has spent billions of petrodollars and billions of cubic meters of water on non-sustainable agriculture, even when cheaper and more water-efficient policy options were available.

Between 1981 and 1989, for example, the government provided farmers with huge incentives to produce wheat. Free land, no-interest loans, and subsidies on farm equipment and fertilizer were offered to peasants. Most enticing of all was the government's guarantee of over four times the world price for wheat. The result was predictable: wheat acreage jumped 11-fold, and output 18-fold during the 1980s. By 1991, wheat production was double domestic demand, and the desert kingdom had become a net exporter of the grain - the world's sixth largest.

Transforming Saudi desert into a bread basket was expensive; billions of dollars were paid to farmers for a product that could have been imported at one-quarter the cost. But even more telling was the policy's effect on precious water stocks. Agriculture's demand for water increased seven-fold between 1980 and 1987 in response to the government stimulus. Moreover, a significant portion of this water was used on wheat that was exported. Between 1980 and 1994, an estimated 34 billion cubic meters of water was poured on 17 million tons of Saudi wheat des-fined for foreign ports. The government essentially subsidized the export of its scarcest and most vital natural resource, and it did so on a significant scale: water used on exported wheat represents nearly 7% of the kingdom's precious reserves. This is 21 years of non-agricultural water consumption that is no longer available to the country.

In 1993, after years of bumper crops and billions in subsidy payments, the government curtailed its purchases of wheat from farmers. Production fell by nearly half, from a 1992 high of 4.1 million tons to 2.2 million tons. But budget deficits, rather than concern over water consumption, appear to have prompted the shift. Plans for the idled land are not clear, but evidently the Saudi government is still not thinking about its long-term survival: instead of pulling back from irrigating the desert, it is reportedly simply shifting from subsidizing the irrigation of wheat to subsidizing the irrigation of barley and vegetables.

PIPE DREAMS: THE LIBYAN CASE

The water-use profiles of Libya and Saudi Arabia are strikingly similar. Both are desert countries whose major water reserves are found underground; both consume more than their annual renewable supplies of water, and both use oil wealth to mine water for an enlarged and more. self-sufficient agricultural sector. But Libya's major fossil aquifers, unlike those of Saudi Arabia, are found hundreds of miles south of its agricultural zone. Thus the major difference in their water supply stories is Libya's reliance on a long and expensive pipeline to link farmers in the north with fossil aquifers in the southeast.

Just how extensive Libya's southern water resources may be is a matter of considerable disagreement among experts. Some engineers assert that the country's fossil water will be depleted in only a few decades, while others predict an assured supply for hundreds of years. What is certain, however, is that the southern aquifers receive very little recharge, and that the supply is not a permanent solution to the country's water needs.

Libya has been receiving warning signs about its water use for at least a decade. By 1985, it was using water at a rate that was 374 percent of its renewable water supply - the highest rate that was overconsumption in the world. Yet, since then, the government has declared its intention of expanding agricultural acreage by nearly three-quarters - hence the plan to pump water across the Sahara Desert, through the world's longest water pipeline.

Dubbed the "Eighth Wonder of the World" by Colonel Qaddafi, the pipeline's first phase carries water to the north coast primarily for use on 500,000 hectares of agricultural land. It is a monumental engineering initiative, with each 80-ton segment of pipe buried in a trench 23 feet deep. During the seven years of construction, the first phase was the world's largest civil engineering venture, requiting more heavy equipment - including 238 bulldozers and 931 trucks - than had ever been assembled for a single project. Later phases, to transport water from southwest to northwest and along the northern coast, will be still larger ventures.

On several counts, the Eighth Wonder of the World is proving to be a monumental mistake. Whereas the country was far from self-sufficient in food before the pipeline was built, it now faces an expensive and unsustainable overcapacity in water, relative to land and labor. New farms planned for the north have not been built, nor have feeder lines been extended to many existing farms. The additional infrastructure will require hundreds of millions of dollars in investment beyond the money already spent on the enormous pipe.

If farms are in short supply, so is the labor to work them. So serious is the farmer shortage that the government ran ads in Cairo newspapers in 1991 to entice Egyptian peasants to staff the new Libyan farms. Colonel Qaddafi has asserted that two million Egyptian farm laborers would be needed in Libya; their emigration would instantly boost Libya's population by over 40 percent.

At this point the scheme's rationale becomes even more deeply flawed. To begin with, it makes little sense to anchor an ongoing economy to a disappearing resource. But to do so in a way that accelerates the resource's depletion - in this case, by bringing in more people to run the new farms, which increases the demand for food and hence for still more water - defies logic.

Finally, as unsettling as the project's rationale, is its cost. Libya spent $5 billion on the project's first phase, and the total project cost is expected to reach $25 billion - eating up a significant chunk of the country's oil revenues. Indeed, 10 percent of 1991 oil receipts were spent on the Eighth Wonder of the World, the government's largest single category of expenditure other than arms purchases.

If history is any guide, only after the resource is near depletion - and long after the economy becomes hooked on it - will the country realize the folly of its megaproject. If Libya wants to avoid a tragedy of its own making, it would do well to look at some painful lessons learned on the High Plains of the United States.

A BOOM BUSTED: THE HIGH PLAINS CASE

The U.S. High Plains sit over an enormous freshwater aquifer called the Ogallala. Extending from South Dakota to Texas, the aquifer is 150 to 300 feet thick and holds more than 4,000 billion cubic meters of water - twice that of Saudi Arabia's fossil aquifers, and enough to cover all 50 states with a foot and a half of water. Ogallala water has transformed previously arid prairie into a huge agricultural belt; over 7 million acres of the old Dust Bowl are watered from the aquifer.

Exploitation of the Ogallala has been under way for decades. By 1945, efficient pumps, cheap natural gas to run them, and fertile land set the stage for widespread irrigation of High Plains farmland. With yields two to three times those of dryland farming, irrigated farming was a profitable venture, and mass exploitation of the aquifer became the norm. Whereas some 2.5 billion cubic meters of water were pumped for irrigation purposes in 1949, the figure jumped to more than 22 billion cubic meters by 1980.

Just as in Saudi Arabia and Libya, however, the rate of water withdrawal from the Ogallala was greater than the rate of recharge - ten times greater in some areas - leading to a net loss of groundwater in every Ogallala state except South Dakota, which has very little irrigated agriculture. Water level declines of more than ten feet have occurred in 29 percent of the Ogallala area, and declines of more than 50 feet are reported in about 7 percent of the region. While the northernmost states over the Ogallala still have ample supplies, those in the south are beginning to run out.

The first warnings were in evidence by 1980, when it was found that the state of Kansas had consumed 38 percent of its share of the Ogallala, and Texas had exhausted more than 20 percent of its share. High Plains farmers cut water consumption in the 1980s, but water tables kept dropping - and the fall is projected to continue. By the year 2040, the aquifer's volume is expected to fall by more than a fifth under the northern Texas High Plains, and by nearly half under the southern Texas part - even assuming the use of strict conservation measures. In the southern section, irrigated cropland was cut by 2 to 4 percent per year between the mid 1970s and 1984, and the decline has continued since then.

Overpumping has serious economic consequences, as residents of the Texas High Plains can attest. A study of eight dryland counties and seven counties irrigated with Ogallala water revealed some striking patterns. Between 1940 and 1959 - the era of aquifer mining similar to the current situation in Saudi Arabia and Libya - irrigated counties flourished compared to their dryland neighbors. All indicators - population, number of farms, total income, total employment, farm size, sales of farm products - showed far greater increases in the irrigated counties than in the dryland ones.

But in the late 1970s, the counties' fortunes began to reverse, as groundwater levels in the irrigated counties fell sharply. Between 1978 and 1984, the cost of pumping from ever-greater depths drove up annual energy expenditures by $7,800 more on Ogallala-watered farms than on dryland farms. Irrigation was halted on 367,000 acres in the irrigated counties, and the area slid into economic decline: farm income fell by 18 percent, population by 3 percent, and total employment by 7 percent. Nearly as many providers of agricultural services lost their jobs in the period as farmworkers did, and about a third as many public sector employees were laid off. The decline cannot be attributed simply to sluggish economic growth in the United States at the time: even as the irrigated counties wilted, the neighboring dryland counties showed healthy growth.

The shift out of irrigated agriculture on the U.S. High Plains, however, is painless compared to what awaits Libya and Saudi Arabia when their fossil aquifers are no longer tappable. Meager rainfall in the two desert nations rules out the fallback option of dryland farming or cattle ranching, except in small coastal areas. Thus, depleted aquifers will mean the decimation of the expanded agricultural sector, not just a shift to a different kind of production.

To avoid economic collapse, the desert nations will have to wean themselves from nonrenewable water - and soon. Saudi Arabia, with 18 million people, and Libya, with 4.7 million, will see their populations double in only 20 years. Providing for growing water needs where current consumption already exceeds the renewable supply will be a staggering challenge for policymakers who - at least so far - have seemed largely oblivious to what awaits them.

A LITER SAVED IS A LITER EARNED

The instinctive response to an apparent shortage of anything is to increase its supply. For Saudi Arabia and Libya, augmented supplies of water - through desalination or even water imports - may indeed be necessary. But with water, as with energy, using the resource more efficiently may offer cheaper, more viable ways of meeting future demand than increasing supplies.

Because agriculture demands two-thirds of the global water consumption, countries in search of water savings may need to ask if they are overextended in agriculture. The environmental and economic costs of food self-sufficiency may greatly exceed its food security benefits in water-scarce countries like Libya and Saudi Arabia. Self-sufficiency may simply be an unaffordable luxury, and the desert countries may have to find their food security in other ways.

But reductions in acreage might be minimized, or even avoided, if other water-saving policies are implemented first. Reduced consumption and more efficient resource use can yield impressive water savings, and are by far the cheapest ways to increase the water supply. Moreover, conservation and efficiency measures can be implemented relatively quickly, and returns are seen almost immediately.

Efficiency is encouraged if the price of water is brought into line with its actual value. Water is a precious resource in Libya, Saudi Arabia, and the High Plains, but its subsidized price does not reflect its true worth. Libyan water valued at 80 cents per cubic meter in the early 1980s was sold to users for only seven cents. In Saudi Arabia, water delivered at a cost of $1.10 per cubic meter is provided to users for 10 cents, or in some cases, for free. On the High Plains (except in New Mexico, where groundwater is considered part of the public domain), farmers own the water beneath their land; their water cost is essentially the cost of pumping, as little as 1 to 2 cents per cubic meter. Distortions like these encourage wasteful depletion of water stocks.

Water-saving measures also increase the usable supply. Libya could serve 41 percent more people if its per capita use were brought down to the same level as that of water-efficient Israel. Indeed, Libyan state farms have a history of poor irrigation, relying heavily on wasteful flood irrigation, whose unlined ditches can lose thousands of gallons of water per foot of ditch. (On the High Plains, losses from open irrigation ditches have been measured at up to 5,000 gallons per foot.) The graph on page 33 illustrates the Libyan case. High population growth and inefficient water use will lead to extreme and unsustainable overconsumption of Libyan water in the decades ahead. On the other hand, a lower rate of growth and Israeli-level water efficiency would bring the country closer to sustainability.

Even with conservation and population stabilization, Saudi Arabia and Libya will need to augment water supplies from other sources. Desalination is likely to be the major source of new supply, but it will be expensive: $1 to $2 per cubic meter, compared to under 50 cents per cubic meter for fresh water. Libya's nonrenewable water consumption before the pipeline was built amounted to 1.9 billion cubic meters, and to meet this demand with desalinated water would require up to $3.8 billion per year. Reduced demand from more efficient water use could cut this expense substantially. Desalination to meet Saudi demand (assuming shrinkage of agriculture to pre-expansion levels) would also cost several billion dollars per year. But policymakers could be confident that water use was sustainable, especially if desalination plants are solar-powered.

REPLENISHING THE WELL

The Saudi, Libyan, and High Plains water use stories are not simply examples of wasteful public policy. They are better seen as pure test cases of society's capacity to confront long-term economic viability. Water, after all, is uniquely precious: it is indispensable and has no substitutes. If so valuable a resource can be so casually squandered, is it any wonder that resources of less immediate value, or whose supply is more renewable - the boreal forests, for example - are treated with such casual disregard? What hope is there for managing these resources responsibly, if we are reckless with the font of all life?

The leaders of developing countries, impatient to participate in the wealth-building of the industrialized world, may - like thirsty trekkers who spy an oasis - be giddy at the promise of abundant water in the short term. But short-term thinking is blind to the crucial truth that most aquifers are renewed only slowly - and some not at all. Unless their water policies change, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and the U.S. High Plains could find themselves pumping not an oasis, but a desert mirage.

FOR FURTHER READING

PETER ROGERS AND PETER LYDON, EDS., Water in the Arab World: Perspectives and Prognoses (CAMBRIDGE, MA.: DIVISION OF APPLIED SCIENCES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 1994)

MOHAMMED ABDULLAH AL-SALEH "DECLINING GROUNDWATER LEVEL OF THE MINJUR AQUIFER, TEBRAK AREA, SAUDI ARABIA," The Geographical Journal, JULY 1992

JOHN OPIE, Ogalla: Water for a Dry Land (LINCOLN, NE: UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS, 1993)

DARRELL S. PECKHAM AND JOHN B. ASHWORTH, "THE HIGH PLAINS AQUIFER SYSTEM OF TEXAS, 1980 TO 1990: OVERVIEW AND PROJECTIONS," (AUSTIN, TX: TEXAS WATER DEVELOPMENT BOARD, SEPTEMBER 1993)

WENDELL HOLMES AND MINDY PETRULIS, "GROUNDWATER IRRIGATION: DECLINING WATER LEVELS IN THE TEXAS HIGH PLAINS TRANSLATE TO DECLINING ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE," (WASHINGTON: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, ECONOMIC RESEARCH SERVICE, 1988)

Gary Gardner is a research associate at the Worldwatch Institute.