Courtesy of Synaps, commentary on the sustainability – or lack thereof – of Jordan’s water-based economy:

Splayed among olive groves and fields of barley, the city of Irbid is hungry for land. For decades, its low-slung concrete buildings have gobbled up the red earth that once made northern Jordan and southern Syria a breadbasket. “The Hawran plain used to feed the Roman Empire,” lamented a sustainability consultant from Irbid. “Now people just build low-quality houses, put up ugly billboards, and throw trash on the ground.”

There is, of course, more to it than that. The transition from fertile fields to concrete jungle tells a human story that goes far beyond Irbid, or indeed Jordan. When the country gained independence in 1946, it was home to less than a million people. Today, the state estimates its population at over 11 million. Its capital, Amman, has grown from a dusty village into a choked metropolis twice the surface area of Barcelona.

Explosive, unplanned urban growth poses countless problems: traffic, pollution, and housing costs, to name a few. By far the most existential threat, though, is water. Most of the capital’s supply is pumped from faraway aquifers, at the expense of the communities and ecosystems around them. The most iconic casualty is the Azraq oasis, in Jordan’s northeast. Azraq’s very name—Arabic for the color blue—now rings with cruel irony, after decades of being sucked dry to supply urban centers. “Azraq was once a center of biodiversity,” wistfully recalled an agricultural engineer specialized in soil health. “People even raised horses there.”

Water scarcity causes leaks, which cause scarcity

Azraq is just one casualty of a countrywide water crisis. In 2017, Jordan’s total demand for water was almost double what it could sustainably consume, per official statistics. As a result, even as Amman sucks water into its orbit from across the country, the capital’s residents face frequent cuts. The on-and-off rhythm of water flow—intermittency, in technical speak—creates acute pressure fluctuations in the grid, which can crack pipes. The result is a vicious cycle in which water scarcity causes leaks, which create yet more scarcity.

Urban growth doesn’t just drain the land—it overruns even the most productive tracts. “Around 90 percent of Jordan’s land is badia,” explained the agricultural engineer, referring to the arid and semi-arid zone that spans broad expanses of Jordan and neighboring countries. “Those areas get less than 200 millimeters of rain per year,” which limits what can be grown without irrigation. By contrast, Jordan’s western highlands—which include major cities like Amman and Irbid—boast rich soil and more reliable precipitation. She went on:

Highland areas like Ajloun and Irbid are the best places in Jordan for rainfed farming. They can get up to 500 millimeters of rain annually. These are the areas where we have historically grown almonds, figs, dates. But they are also very attractive areas for real estate development. So we have a huge amount of building on fertile land.

Worse still, voracious horizontal sprawl spurs appetite for construction materials, the extraction of which further ravages key ecosystems. “There are quarries all over the country mining for cement and other building materials,” said the sustainability consultant. “Most of it is illegal. I’ve heard that there are 45 quarries in Ajloun alone, of which only five are licensed.” Such figures are hard to verify, but easy to believe: A quick glance at state media affirms the spread of illegal quarrying in Ajloun, which is famed for its lush forestland.

The origins of this local transformation are in fact global. Starting around 1950, when Jordan was still newborn, humanity embarked on what is sometimes called the Great Acceleration. Spurred by a mix of technology, demography, and post-war economics, the pace of human development took off like a rocket. Global population size, urbanization, and car ownership rose exponentially. So did consumption of water, fertilizer, and energy. The availability of concrete slashed the cost of building. In the United States, this gave rise to a culture of highways, private automobiles, suburban malls, and conspicuous consumption. Look around Jordan, and indeed much of the Middle East and the globe today, and these same hallmarks are never too far away.

Jordan’s very geography is a product of the tumultuous mid-twentieth century. Its colonially imposed borders fostered the conditions for large inflows of refugees and scant inflows of water. Its most important rivers, the Jordan and Yarmouk, are at the mercy of strong, cantankerous neighbors—namely Israel and, to a lesser extent, Syria. The all-important Disi aquifer, which supplies drinking water to Amman, straddles the border with Saudi Arabia: a regional behemoth with triple Jordan’s population and eight times its GDP per capita. Borders hurt pastoralist tribes who had, for centuries, moved with the seasons across the badia’s grasslands. They were suddenly hemmed in by boundaries that slashed through the steppe. To compensate for this loss, the state doled out jobs and improved services, enabling more consumption. Water and soil dwindled while society swelled.

Spills

Many Jordanians have little patience for the notion that their crisis has been imposed from outside, or can simply be blamed on fate. “The government is always talking about how Jordan is the second most water-poor state in the world,” complained a retired public school teacher, who now tends to a fruit farm in Jordan’s fertile north. “It’s an excuse for how bad things are. The real problem is that our water isn’t managed well.”

Indeed, as much as the kingdom’s population is bumping up against limited water, land, and wealth, it’s also clear that Jordan could do much more with what it has. Half of the water pumped through Jordan’s pipes is lost to either leaks or theft. In part, this so-called “non-revenue water” can be chalked up to aging infrastructure, intermittent supply, and short-staffing. “The big water utilities simply do not have the staff to detect leaks 24/7,” observed a PhD student studying water governance. “They can’t catch problems and fix them fast enough.” As a result, and despite international donors spending hundreds of millions of dollars to address the problem, water loss remains stubbornly high.

Meanwhile, many farmers and households find ways to skirt limits on water consumption—and to underpay for what they use. This practice is widespread and widely acknowledged, even by those engaged in it. “Of course we steal water,” explained a middle-class farmer in the Jordan Valley. “If the amount of water I’m allocated is not enough to keep my crops alive, I’ll remove the meter and take more. The fines cost less than letting my crops die.” He paused to ponder the wisdom of discussing this with a notebook-toting researcher. “Don’t tell the Americans about this. Actually, it’s fine, you can tell anyone.”

“The fines cost less than letting my crops die.”

Farmers like him bristle at the notion that they are to blame for the kingdom’s water crisis. He is, after all, a small player growing wheat and bell peppers that feed Jordanians themselves. The real culprits, he and others insist, are big corporate investors who pour vast quantities of heavily subsidized water onto cash crops that make profitable exports. Some do so in desert areas with scant rainfall, at the expense of dwindling aquifers like Disi and Mafraq. Others are said to dole out kickbacks to pay less than they should and thus improve their margins. “I know a guy with a fruit farm that makes a million Jordanian dinar [1.4 million USD] in annual profit,” claimed a well-connected accountant. “He’ll pump 500,000 cubic meters of groundwater per year, but bribe an official to record his withdrawal as only 50,000.” Such accusations are as common as they are difficult to prove.

Cashing in on Jordan’s water means exporting it to richer countries in the form of produce. In 2021, Jordan was the world’s sixth largest exporter of peaches and nectarines and the thirteenth biggest exporter of tomatoes, according to the Observatory for Economic Complexity. It is also a major exporter of goats and sheep: livestock for which the badia is famed, but which—absent state support for ecosystem management—can also take a toll on soil health. In a cruel twist of globalization, many Jordanians can no longer afford to buy local, or baladi, meat; it’s cheaper for them to buy mass-produced imports, shipped over thousands of kilometers from Australia and New Zealand. Perhaps most galling of all is the water that gets poured not into food exports, but heavy industry: Jordan is a major exporter of phosphates and potash, at least some of which is produced with high quality rainwater.

The kingdom is not alone in selling its natural wealth

The kingdom is not alone in selling its natural wealth to richer nations. At the other end of the Mediterranean, drought-stricken Morocco pumps water into thirsty avocados ultimately consumed in Europe. Similarly, Mexico’s gangs burn forests to grow avocados destined for the United States. Such trade works well for big exporters in the Global South, and for consumers in rich countries. But they take a toll on ecosystems that now struggle to feed their own people.

Jordan’s failure to make better use of scarce resources reflects a broader crisis rippling through the Arab world. The kingdom, like much of the region, built its post-independence economy on rent: petrodollars from newly rich Gulf states, Cold War largesse from the US and USSR, and aid in exchange for combatting jihadis and containing refugees. This wealth has trickled down to society in the form of government jobs and generous subsidies for staples like water and energy. It has also obscured the rot within economies where states have spent lavishly but produced little by way of real value or tax revenue.

In Jordan, as in other Arab states, this model began to strain toward the turn of the century. Faced with rising debt and pressure from Western funders to cut state spending, Jordan turned toward privatization. The ensuing story is familiar: Crony capitalism flourished, public services eroded, and inequality spiked. Small and medium businesses now struggle to cut through thickets of red tape and endemic inefficiency. Saddled with a bloated payroll and heavy debt burdens, state spending remains high even as social protections for the most vulnerable reach new lows.

Nowhere is this more visible than in far-flung rural areas. Those who tend the land are squeezed between vanishing state support, dwindling rains, and a flood of cheap imports. In the hills outside Irbid, a father of three recounted how he has tried and failed to make a living by raising sheep: “My dream is to build this into a real business, but it’s really hard unless you have serious capital.” He now reluctantly spends three of every four months working in Saudi Arabia, not least as a way of paying off the loans he took out to pull through bad seasons. Some indebted producers are fleeing the country altogether—an extreme measure reflecting the fact that, in Jordan, unpaid debts land you in prison.

In Jordan, unpaid debts can land you in prison

In the poor southern governorate of Tafilah, a 17-year-old shepherd is waiting on a solution closer to home. He has been herding since age 13, but will quit as soon he gets a spot in Jordan’s army. “There’s no future in livestock. The rains are getting worse, so there’s less grass and we must buy more commercial fodder.” Survival means counting calories: “We always have five or six dogs, no more and no less. If they have puppies that have no purpose, we either shoot them or poison them. We can’t afford to feed them, so they would get hungry and attack the sheep.” Little wonder that he and many others, including his three brothers, prefer salaried government jobs. But more people on the state’s payroll means fewer to feed society.

Sludge

In 2021, farmers in the town of Dhiban faced an abrupt and mysterious crisis. The reservoir of the Wala Dam, whose water nourishes the town’s farms and fisheries, had shrunk to a puddle. An official declared that the dam had been poorly designed and needed to be drained to avert collapse. Unconvinced, others theorized that the reservoir was so polluted that the state drained it to avoid poisoning the underlying aquifer. A compensation package from the state only partly cushioned the economic fallout for locals, while the real reason for the draining remains a mystery. “Inured to neglect and empty promises,” wrote the researcher Dan Wilkofsky, “Dhiban’s residents seem largely to have given up on learning the truth.”

Opacity and mistrust are all too common in discussions of Jordan’s environmental crisis. The kingdom is awash with studies, visions, technical expertise, and foreign funds. Yet official data evokes suspicion, laws and strategies stay on the shelf, and foreign aid largely evaporates into a mist of ephemeral projects. All of which begs the question: In a country that is running out of water, how can a large dam empty without anyone knowing why?

This confusion has nothing to do with science or technical capacity

For one, Jordan is not a place where information moves freely. “The Department of Statistics has a habit of making things up,” said the Jordanian accountant, with a hint of sorrow. Years of Western funding for good governance, human rights, and independent media have run parallel to an authoritarian drift and the shrinking of civic space. A young Jordanian activist noted that she rarely sees Arabic media cover local security incidents; instead, she hears about them from American friends who consult sources in English.

Such obfuscation extends to the environmental sphere. Water is regarded as a matter of national security, and thus shrouded in uncertainty. Experts fret about not knowing which corporate farms are plundering which vital aquifers. Some worry that the capital’s drinking water contains more uranium than the state lets on. Others cast doubt on official data regarding the quality of treated wastewater, which is used for certain forms of agriculture. “The water we get is filthy,” scowled a farmer in the Jordan Valley. “They say we can use it to grow food, but it’s not even fit for washing.”

This lack of clarity, and the frustration it generates, is pervasive. An employee in Jordan’s largest nature reserve pondered long-running fears that copper-mining would tear up a chunk of this biodiversity hotspot: “Frankly,” he said, “it’s impossible to know.” Despite years of scoping, nobody seems sure whether the area contains enough copper to be commercially viable. Another debate concerns the viability of using sludge—the solid byproduct of treating wastewater—as a fertilizer. Some insist that Jordan’s sludge is treated to a standard where it can be safely used for selected crops. “We have excellent sludge!” said the sustainability consultant, brightly. Others are not convinced, so sludge is mostly stockpiled or landfilled; some is said to be stolen and used on the sly.

This confusion has nothing to do with science, technical capacity, nor even funding shortfalls. It reflects, instead, a man-made haze of disinformation and distrust that pervades not just Jordan but the wider Middle East and beyond. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which sell themselves as the region’s leaders on climate innovation, are quick to suppress even basic forms of criticism and inquiry. In Western states, companies and governments have a decades-long history of muddying the waters. They have done so via a mix of outright lies and more subtle sleight of hand: The market for carbon offsets is, for the most part, a well-documented scam. The same is true of Western claims to be supporting poor countries via “climate finance,” which until now largely boils down to predatory international loans.

Where Jordan stands out, however, is in just how little it can afford such fudging. Everyone agrees that the kingdom is exhausting its water, and that climate change only makes matters worse. Unlike similarly dry Gulf monarchies, Jordan lacks the wealth to indefinitely manufacture solutions like desalinated seawater. A major crisis is looming, but no one knows exactly how soon it will reach full force. The leading independent media outlet 7iber summed up this unnerving mix of clarity and ambiguity in the attention-grabbing title of its investigative series: “Thirst on the horizon.”

Splurge

Given what is at stake, it is unnerving just how little confidence anyone seems to have in the solutions on offer. Many of them are commonsense. Jordan desperately needs to repair its crumbling infrastructure and reform the sclerotic institutions that maintain it. It needs to rein in the overexploitation of water, particularly by big corporate users who give little or nothing back to society. And it must revive the state’s agricultural services, left to decay amid decades of privatization. These ideas are also nothing new: “For three decades, we have all been studying pathways to sustainability in Jordan,” remarked an agricultural engineer from Irbid. “We know what’s needed.”

And yet, little progress has been made on any of the above, despite lavish investment by Western donors and development banks. “We’re constantly reinventing the wheel,” remarked the same engineer. “Sometimes I’ll attend a project launch and say—‘Wait, this sounds like a project I was involved with 15 years ago!’” This sense of déjà vu is endemic to Jordan’s aid sector: Decades of support for state institutions, NGOs, and all manner of trainings don’t seem to have changed much. “We have a joke about this sector,” said a development consultant, herself weary of trying to get things done in what feels like a broken system. “If you stop a Jordanian on the street and ask them what they do, you’ll find that they are either an NGO trainer or a trainee.”

A sense of running in place reflects the fact that—for all the aid it receives—Jordan’s cash-strapped state is in constant survival mode. A former minister explained, perhaps with some exaggeration:

The government is not concerned about the environment. The environment is a long-term issue, and the government has no fiscal space to think long-term. The budget is totally consumed by short-term expenses: salaries, pensions, debt servicing. We’re a typical developing country, selling the future to pay for the present. We’re not even getting a good price.

Economic constraints are layered onto thorny political sensitivities. Jordan’s authorities are said to shy away from reforms—say, restricting the use of groundwater to grow nectarines in the desert—that would antagonize key businessmen or important tribes. Such trepidation extends to individual officials: In a country famous for sacking its prime minister each time a political crisis strikes, many would rather keep their heads down than push for unpopular change. “You don’t get anything for succeeding,” added the former minister. “But you do get punished for bad publicity.”

“We’re a typical developing country, selling the future to pay for the present.”

This mix of passivity, risk aversion, and tight budgets feeds another problem: aid dependence. While much of the Middle East relies on foreign aid, few countries have been so thoroughly dependent on it since their very inception. Often, a state agency’s ability to execute a project is only as good as its skill in pitching to donors. The manager of a local administrative body providing technical support to farmers produced an English-language wishlist of projects, aimed squarely at foreign backers. The land surrounding his office, allocated for testing new approaches, is mostly fallow for lack of money and water. Honey mesquite trees, an invasive species, colonize the mostly abandoned plot.

Reliance on donors poses several problems. In Jordan, like anywhere else, aid interventions are famously disjointed. Countless embassies and development banks pump money through multiple ministries, for-profit consultancies, and NGOs. The result is a crazy quilt of projects, acronyms, and metrics. “Part of the problem is just how many donors there are,” sighed the weary development consultant. “A single ministry might be dealing with 15 different donors simultaneously.” Add to this the fragmentation of Jordanian institutions themselves, and it becomes easy to see the difficulty of tackling complex, structural problems like water and food security, all of which calls for a coordinated state policy.

A great deal of money flows instead to trendy micro-solutions, which are often not solutions at all. Many help those who need it least. Donors have, for example, enthusiastically taken to supporting the cultivation of Medjool date palms. These trees are well suited to Jordan’s increasingly saline soil, but are also costly to grow, take years to turn a profit, and are thus not viable for ordinary farmers. Their succulent fruits are mostly exported, satisfying no one but the growers. The same can be said about donor funding for hydroponic agriculture: a high-tech, capital-intensive approach mostly suited to a limited range of crops, notably lettuce and tomato. “Hydroponics are fine if you’re a turtle,” deadpanned a European academic writing her dissertation on agriculture. “But they don’t do much for food security.”

To the extent big-picture solutions are discussed, too many boil down to dubious megaprojects. One approach, breathlessly trumpeted as part of a “Green Blue Deal,” proposed swapping Jordanian renewable energy for desalinated seawater from Israel. This vision rested on an awkward premise from the start, given Israel’s track record of diverting or withholding water from its Arab neighbors. The war on Gaza now makes an unlikely prospect unbearable. Still on the table is the National Carrier, a long-delayed plan to spend billions of dollars on a pipeline that would pump desalinated water from the Red Sea to Amman—which is 450 kilometers away, and uphill. No one, not even officials and contractors involved, seems certain that it will ever be completed. Even if it were, it will only partially plug the country’s water deficit.

* * *