LONDON: Doom-laden forecasts that fierce competition for scarce water resources will one day spark armed conflict in the volatile Middle East sound plausible enough.

Possible water wars may be among the worries preying on the minds of participants at the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development opening in Johannesburg on August 26.

But although population growth has fuelled water demand that now far exceeds the Middle East’s dwindling supply, the deficit has rarely led to hostilities, apart from some Syrian-Israeli skirmishes in the northern Jordan Valley in the 1960s.

Tony Allan, a professor at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, says the answer to the conundrum lies in the availability of “virtual water” on the world grain markets.

Noting that producing a ton of wheat requires 1,000 ton of water, he argues that wheat imports have spared governments the need to find scarce freshwater to grow food at home.

“By the year 2000, the Middle East and North Africa were importing 50 million tons of grain annually, satisfying the largest demand for water in the region — food production.

“The remaining 10 per cent of water demand for drinking, domestic and industrial use may soon be met through low-cost desalinated seawater,” Allan writes in a study due to appear soon in the SAIS Review, a journal published by Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

The Middle East, the world’s most water-challenged region, depends on fresh surface and groundwater for farming, unlike temperate regions, where naturally occurring soil water provides up to 90 per cent of the water used to produce crops.

Allan says the region ran out of water resources to meet its strategic needs for domestic, industrial and agricultural uses, in 1970. While “virtual water” in the form of imported grain has eased regional water tensions since then, its availability has weakened the incentive to use water more efficiently.

“Every year, farmers and traders in the Middle East move volumes of water equivalent to the flow of the Nile into Egypt, or about 25 per cent of the region’s total available freshwater,” Allan writes.

The imported grain is artificially cheap thanks to years of North American and European agricultural subsidies.

This bounty has enabled Middle Eastern leaders to propagate what Allan calls the fantasy of “claiming that water deficit problems are being solved domestically and that their countries are achieving self-sufficiency in water and food production”.

For the past 50 years, he says, governments have leaned on this outside resource to implement otherwise unsustainable water allocation policies, while keeping their “virtual water” imports “invisible economically and silent politically”.

NEGOTIATING PEACE, NOT WATER: The population of the Jordan River Basin, which includes Israel, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza and southern Syria, has grown six-fold since the late 1940s when it was secure in water.