2023-04-29 09:57:12
In the Negev desert, in southern Israel, it hardly rains. A total of 200 mm per year, less than half that in Madrid and a sixth of what falls in Galicia. In addition, almost all the rain is concentrated between December and March. The rest of the year, total drought.
That is where the Netafem company was born in 1965, now owned by a Mexican company. It is a global leader in micro-irrigation, systems to take advantage of every drop of water. According to the company’s account, the idea for drip irrigation arose when an engineer noticed a group of trees that bloomed green all year round in the middle of the desert. He realized that they were receiving drops of water from a leaky pipe. He copied the idea and began to perfect it in the kibbutz (agricultural community) of Hatzerim. In the mid-1980s, its drip irrigation products began to be sold all over the world.. It is now present in a dozen countries and has twenty factories around the world. Its small drippers and irrigation pipes can be purchased online and in specialized agricultural supply stores around the globe. They have defined themselves as a company “born to make the desert of Israel flourish”.
Israel is considered by experts as a benchmark country in the rational use of water for agriculture. Last week, the Minister of Agriculture, Luis Planas, gave it as an example, in the middle of the controversy over the use of water Donana for irrigation and in the middle of a heat wave and drought that plagues the country. “We have to modernize the sector from a technological point of view to use less water, and start using less quantity, reclaimed water, desalination; adapt crops and use seeds that require less water, ”he said in an interview on Cadena Ser.“You have to know how to adapt. I always think of Israel. They have two harvests a year with climatic conditions that are much more extreme than ours.”
Israel is located in one of the areas with the least rainfall in the world, and at the same time it has a vertiginous population increase, derived from the high birth rate of the religious orthodox. Now home to 9.3 million people; three million more than at the beginning of the 21st century. It suffers from increasing water stress.
Israel and water for agriculture
It is not an exporting power of agricultural products, like Ukraine or Spain. What it sells the most abroad are diamonds (close to 9,000 million), integrated circuits (5,000) or refined oil (2,500). The export of agricultural products remains at 1,000 million. As a reference, Spain exports, only in fruit, 10,000 million. But except for grain, which it imports, it has managed to be essentially self-sufficient in its food supply. How did you manage it, with so little water?
“In Israel, more than 90% of the water is recycled for use in agricultureeach drop is used twice: first for human consumption, and then for irrigation”, they explain from the Israeli Embassy in Spain. The country is a global leader in the reuse of wastewater. “In addition, a huge effort is made to check that there are no water leaks in the pipes,” he adds. It is managed by the public companies IWA (Israel Water Authority) and Mekorot. One of the key decisions that have been made is to put the market price on the water. I mean, very expensive. This has also reduced consumption and waste.
In Spain, about 700,000 million liters of water are lost each year due to leaks in the pipes, the annual consumption of 14 million people. “Another of the advantages that Israel has is that, from the water point of view, there is a single state entity that manages all the water”. In Spain, each river basin (Duero, Ebro, Tagus, Guadalquivir…) has authority over this management. That of the Tagus, for example, continuously defines the amount that is transferred to irrigation in Murcia.
In Israel, the only source of fresh water is the Sea of Galilee in the north of the country, which provides about 30% of the total supply. The main source of obtaining water is desalination, which is obtained from five main plants: Ashdod, Ashkelon, Palmachim, Hadera and Sorek 1 and 2, which are among the largest in the world. generate about 40% of the water consumed. Spain, in this sense, is also very advanced. It is the fifth global leader and uses 20% of said resource in agriculture.
Another important factor is the implementation of fertigation, in which the plants are supplied with dripping water, also including fertilizers. Or an evolution of this, the nutririgo: desert sand is used to fix the plant in the soil and everything else it needs, both water and all the nutrients, is supplied artificially through drippers.
They develop special seeds with genetic engineering. Some consume less water. Others are even capable of growing in the slightly salty water abundant in the subsoil of the region, known as brackish.
Controversial control of aquifers
The idea of turning the semi-desert that is Israel into an orchard is deeply embedded in the dreams of the Zionist project that was consummated with the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948. One of the original plans was to build a huge aqueduct from the ‘sea of Galilee’, to the north, covering the entire country to the south. Allow agriculture to flourish. The national company Mekorot began to build the National Water Carrier aqueduct. It was completed in 1964, and continues to transport nearly two million cubic meters of water every day over its 130-kilometre length.
Three years later, in the 1967 war against the Arab countries, Israel seized control by military force of all water sources in the territories it occupied. It preserves, to this day, the exclusive control of all those water sources between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, except for a small section of an aquifer in the Gaza Strip (one of two territories that is part, along with the West Bank, of occupied Palestine). “Israel uses water as it sees fit, and ignores the needs of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, subjecting them to man-made water shortages,” denounces the Israeli Palestinian rights NGO, B’tselem. “In Gaza, the water delivered to them is substandard and not drinkable.”
Agriculture predominates among the settlers of the illegal settlements. It is common to see through the Palestinian territories occupied totally green israeli settlements on top of totally parched mountains; parks, trees, grass.
Companies such as Netafem itself have been accused of fomenting the occupation and are on the list of the boycott movement against the Israeli occupation BDS.
In the Oslo agreements at the end of the nineties, water was distributed temporarily as part of the peace plan to build a palestinian state. Israel accounted for 80% of the water in the aquifers; to Palestine, 20%. But not even that distribution has been fulfilled.
#Minister #Planas #put #Israel #water #agriculture