Experts: Water bankruptcy is one of three crises threatening Iran

Experts: Water bankruptcy is one of three crises threatening Iran



Twilight News

5 hours ago

[Asharq Al-Awsat] Iran is approaching a water-bankrupt stage, a stage in which the chances of a return to normalcy are virtually non-existent.

This is what independent experts say, as confirmed by the Iranian president's assistant, the head of the Environment Organization, Issa Kalantari, and the official responsible for the revival of Lake Aromieh, who served as Agriculture Minister; the first accused of wasting water and entering Iran into a state of no return in water bankruptcy.

Statistics show that Iran's strategic water munitions have fallen 90 per cent in nine decades, and Iran has lost 80 per cent of them over the past four decades. The water rate has decreased from 13,000 cubic meters per year to 1,400 cubic meters. More than 60 percent of Iranian dam stores are empty. Of the 220 large cities in Iran, 140 face a severe water crisis. More than 298 fertile hotspots in Iran have turned into barren deserts.

All of these figures illustrate part of the water crisis in Iran which, according to opinion polls, over 10 years has been the permanent crisis between 10 crises that hit Iran and at the same time topped the list of crises over the last two years; higher than the unemployment and addiction crises, the economic corruption crisis and the poverty crisis .

"The main enemy of Iran is not Israel, but the water crisis," says Clantree. More clearly, the adviser to Iranian strategic adviser Rahim Safavi says: "There is no escape from tensions and conflicts in the water fields if Iran does not find a way out of the water crisis." The words are interpreted by many as a warning of an internal water war on Iran's doorstep.

In fact, the idea of ​​internal war is no longer fiction; Over the last three decades, a third of the protests in Iran have focused on water. As well as the largest protests in the past decades in Iran in terms of census.

In the year 2016, Ahwaz saw the largest demonstration against the transformation of the Karun River with the participation of more than 40,000. Most of the water protests were mostly violent and repressive by the security forces. Independent statistics show that protests over water have so far recorded 16 dead in Iran and hundreds of detainees.

In the Iranian water protests, it is remarkable that they are not concentrated in one point; they have caused divisions in Iran's geography. Experts believe that water is the biggest threat to Iranian territorial integrity in the near future.

A quick look at the state of the water crisis and its developments in Iran shows that it is sufficient to ignite a comprehensive crisis in Iran. But the water crisis in Iran has led to other crises, one of which could be a "super crisis" or a "super-challenge."

The water crisis led to unprecedented intervention by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Energy to impose a list of prohibited crops on farmers in many areas. This year, the authorities announced the restriction of summer farming in Ahwaz, Isfahan, Yazid, Kermanshah, Jilan, Mazandaran, Hamdan and the "central" province. This means depriving Iran of thousands of tons of crops and unemployment of about 250,000 in a country unable to tame the horse of unbridled unemployment.

The unemployment crisis among farmers as a result of the prevention of agriculture, the dehydration of agricultural land and the scarcity of water will lead to large-scale migration from villages to cities and the exacerbation of the crisis of shantytowns. The "shantytown" crisis is one of three major crises in Iran, the "mother of crises," such as addiction, social problems, the denial of schooling and violence in cities; a crisis exacerbated by drought of agricultural land and water crisis and migration from villages to cities.

In addition, the water crisis has caused environmental crises ... The largest drought in Iran is four water basins: an Oorman lake in Western Azerbaijan, the agricultural marshes of Hawazah in Ahwaz, Lake Kowhoni in Isfahan and Lake Hermand in Balochistan. Each of which is a major environmental crisis has become the origin of dust storms that hit half the geography of Iran. The waves of dust, in addition to the spread of many diseases, including tsunami, cancer, respiratory diseases and skin diseases, laid the first building blocks of social and political mobility, which experts believe will become one of the main influences in the alignment of social forces, and in the game of Iranian politics.

Experts believe that internal war on water and social unrest is inevitable. Protests in Mahmara and Abadan in recent weeks have led to at least five deaths among demonstrators by security forces and protests in the city of Kazrun, one of which was shot by security forces in the last week, possibly prototypes of the war. Assistant Iranian Minister of Labor pointed out in an article in an Iranian newspaper to the water crisis in the context of the comprehensive war in Syria these days, and expects the Iranian official that Iran's delay in processing will not make it far from the scenarios of the Syrian track. "There may not be time to compensate, we are no longer in the crisis phase; we have entered a phase of water bankruptcy," he said.

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