Yesterday I joined a group of water experts from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen for a field study to Rsaifeh - which is an impoverished industrial / residential area sandwiched between and linking two major cities, Amman and Zarqa.
Many decades ago, the area prospered around the Zarqa River, which later dried up to become a seasonal torrent, which was totally dry at the time of our visit yesterday. The river dried due to extremely rapid and disorganised urbanisation, industrial expansion, and due to pumping a major share of its water to serve the big cities, which in turn, poured waste water into the torrent. A treatment station was established to treat waste water downstream, i.e. after Rsaifeh. So the residents of Rsaifeh are meant to live with the fact that the big cities took their clean water and gave them bad waste water instead - without any compensation.
On the "bank" of the torrent, we met one farmer who grows different vegetables by the nation's only yeast factory. He irrigates his crops with the factory's waste water, which he says is "bio-degradable" - impressive use of terminology from a farmer who never finished his school education.
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| Farmer Abu Khaled (left) and friends, with their plot of land behind, and urbanisation crawling down on their land. |
The factory owner thinks this is a good deal. He provides waste water from yeast production to the farmer for free, instead of having to transfer it to a waste water treatment plant and pay a large sum for them to clean and reuse the waters. The Rsaifeh municipality had earlier banned his factory from pouring its waste water into the Zarqa torrent, and deemed the water unhealthy. Both the farmer and the factory owner think this is a good deal, as crops grow successfully using this "free" water.
However, the agriculture ministry thinks this is a bad idea, and would often come and plough the crops away because they deem them harmful (although they've never tested the biodegradability of this sample of waste water in agricultural production). Farmer becomes unhappy.
Another problem, is the urban expansion. Ministry of municipalities has finally agreed, after lobbying from farmers, environmental activists, and a cooperative for local women to stop allocating this farmland as a low-cost residential area. However, urbanisation is closing in on the little green plots that are left, and air, land and water pollution is rapidly increasing. Which puts the quality of the agricultural products in question, regardless of the water used for irrigation.
Climate change increases the dryness of this area, also very noticeably. Poverty and underdevelopment there is easy to see and relate to. In short, this little farm plot is everything the world water community agenda is all about.
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