Yemen's Water Shortage

As of 2012, Yemen's capital Sana'a has been speculated to be the first capital city in the world that will be left without a sustainable water supply by the year 2040. The reason behind this Arab country’s increasingly dangerous water shortage stems from a problem that has occurred throughout the nation’s history that happens to have both natural and anthropogenic causes.

The most significant of these problems has been the water mismanagement with the overproduction of qat, a chewable plant that plays a large part in Yemeni culture and consumes nearly fifty percent of the agricultural water supply. The problem with the extreme cultivation of the product is that it requires too much irrigation for the arid region it is being grown in.

The other part of this problem can be noted in the pictures below. The majority of the country’s population is located near the water basins which results in excessive amounts of water being drawn from the reserves at the same time. In 2004 the World Bank suggested that only sixty-seven percent of the Yemeni population had sufficient access to water, and in a country of nearly 25 million, that means that only a little over 16 million inhabitants have adequate access to something that is vital.

Just to put it into perspective, Sana'a residents usually receive public water once every nine days, while Ta'izz (a less populated city in the southwest of the country) residents usually receive it every 45 days. Yemen’s General Rural Water Authority has set out groups of water distributors to transport the liquid throughout the needed areas of the country, but still a large portion of the country finds itself without sufficient water.

It’s truly tragic to think that because the Yemeni government failed to administer regulations and inadequately enforced laws regarding the production of qat the people of Yemen are left almost completely without something that is absolutely necessary for survival. This disaster can still be handled differently, but action needs to be taken before it’s too late.