Arable Land And Water Supplies
The proportion of arable land in the region ranges from 1 to 3 percent in Libya and Algeria, respectively, to 17 to 19 percent in Tunisia and Morocco. Accordingly, Libya and Algeria have permanent crops on less than 0.5 percent of their land, and their economies rely heavily on petroleum reserves.
Libya has attempted to increase its proportion of arable land through the largest water development project in the world, the Great Man-Made River, which taps vast freshwater aquifers in rock strata beneath the Sahara. Libya hopes to use the project to showcase its engineering prowess, achieve food self-sufficiency in part through improved livestock production, and offer its coastal citizens inexpensive, high-quality fresh water relative to what had been available through its desalinization plants. The massive project was conceived in the late 1960s, and feasibility studies were undertaken in the 1970s. Work started in the 1980s, and the first phase of the project, including a 1,200-kilometer pipeline, was completed in 1991. The network of pipes (some as much as four meters wide), pumps, wells, and other infrastructure is expected to reach completion, including 3,500 to 4,000 kilometers of pipeline and two aqueducts stretching 1,000 kilometers, around 2030. Water is expected to flow through the 2050s, possibly to 2100, but skeptics wonder whether Libya plans to use the large pipes for military purposes such as storing chemical weapons, whether the removal of such large volumes of underground water will shift the course of the Nile toward Libya, whether Libya is tapping aquifers to which Egypt or Tunisia may have claims, and what compensation may go to those whose homes stand in the path of the giant project. Among Libyans the project has widespread support and is a source of pride for its sheer size, with popular media describing it as the Eighth Wonder of the World for its size and the fiscal restraint demonstrated by the project's investment-based and largely locally derived funding such as taxes on luxury goods, as opposed to amassing debt in the form of World Bank loans. Libya's longtime leader, Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, points to the project as evidence that Libya is a peaceful nation seeking development, not a terror state as it is portrayed in the West. Economic sanctions from the West have slowed progress on the Great Man-Made River, but Libyans are determined to achieve food self-sufficiency and technological proficiency despite those impediments.
Algeria struggles to provide adequate supplies of potable water to its citizens. Water supplies in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia are contaminated by the dumping of raw sewage. Regional environmental issues include desertification and soil erosion from overgrazing, farming in marginal areas, and vegetation destruction and/or deforestation. In Tunisia threats to health are posed by ineffective disposal of toxic and hazardous wastes. The coastal waters off Morocco and Algeria are polluted with raw sewage, fertilizer runoff, wastes from petroleum refining, and other industrial effluents. Algeria's rivers are similarly polluted. The Mediterranean is also a major oil transportation route into which up to a million tons of crude oil are discharged annually through accidental spills, illegal tank cleaning, and inadequate harbor facilities. Pollution of coastal waters has implications for tourism and Moroccan fish exports. With reference to other resources, Tunisia, unlike Libya, is heavily invested in extractive industries
The Great Man-Made River, in Southern Libya. The son of Libyan leader Moamer Kadhaft Saifal-Islam, center, attends a ceremony to mark the arrival of water from the Great Man-Made River. The river is a huge network ofpipes that supplies water from under the Sahara desert to various cities throughout Libya. The percent of arable land in Libya is between one and three percent, and the hope is that this project will increase self-sufficiency and availability of higher-quality freshwater in the country. mahmud TURKIA/ AFP/GETTY IMAGES.
and, with Morocco and Algeria, has reserves of iron ore, lead, and zinc, whereas Tunisia and Morocco mine salt and Morocco and Algeria extract phosphates.
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