Page 93 - Arabian Studies (V)

Water Resources and Agriculture in Qatar 83
leading to the salinisation of freshwater resources. Even at present
rate of extraction the effective life of the northern aquifer is estimated
to be of the order of only 25-30 years. Present agricultural production
is hampered by a number of serious constraints and cannot be said to
be a viable commercial enterprise. Present levels of production per
unit of water are very low and on-farm investment and provision of
supplies are both sub-optimal. This stems from the non-commercial
approach to farming decisions by landowners, insecurity of tenure,
the lower opportunity cost of investment in the rapidly developing
urban sector, chronic labour shortages coupled with the low standard
of farming skill of available labour, and poor water and land manage­
ment.
. With large accumulated financial reserves and committed to an
energetic development programme, one aim of which is to attain some
measure of domestic self-sufficiency in basic foodstuffs, the Govern­
ment of Qatar are understandably anxious to undertake a consider­
able horizontal expansion in agriculture. The major limitations to this
policy aim are the lack of adequate and economic water resource, a
harsh climate, a small population and the present low standard of
irrigated agriculture. However, investigations carried out over the
past three years have shown that through the introduction of.efficient
irrigation and soil management practices, production on existing land
may be doubled through utilising only half the amount of ground-
water presently being extracted. This would halt the present ground-
water overdraft condition and would meet local demand for certain
horticultural crops and provide a small surplus for export at certain
times of the year.
The vertical expansion solution to the problem will not however
achieve Government’s aim of achieving domestic self-sufficiency and
it has been suggested that a horizontal expansion of agriculture to the
full extent of the arable soils of the country could be achieved through
the use of distilled sea water injected to the aquifer as temporary
storage and later pumped for irrigation. While this concept is bold and
imaginative, stemming from a desire to convert large financial
reserves based on oil production into a renewable natural resource in
the long-term, there are a number of conceptual defects to the propo­
sition . But perhaps the most telling argument against such a solution is
an economic one; the high cost of distilled sea water and its subsequent
injection compared to the low value of agriculture produce would
require Government to indirectly subsidise agriculture to the extent of
£ 100 million per annum.
Thus, while attention is presently focused on oil production and its
eventual cessation within thirty years Qatar (in common with a
number of Gulf States) faces the possibilit of consuming its reserves of