Cyprus swelters, in need of rain

On the flat-roofed houses of Nicosia rotund white plastic containers, resembling small petrol tankers without wheels, crouch among television masts and satellite dishes. These curious objects - water containers - are the newest shape on the skyline of this small-town capital city.

Towering on spindly legs above these containers are the usual square water tanks connected to large rectangular glass-fronted panels angled at 45 degrees to catch the sun, which provide hot water to the households below.

But the traditional tanks no longer suffice, for Cyprus is in the grip of a drought. The rains have failed to fill the reservoirs for three consecutive years. So during this summer, the hottest in decades, water has been rationed. The life-giving fluid, tepid and flat, steals down the pipes at the dead of night three times a week, flows surreptitiously into the new tanks for a few hours, and ceases with the dawn. Pressure is so low that the flow never reaches most of the long-legged square tanks which have served the city so well for the past 30 years.

The city has changed at ground level as well. Gardens flourish only where there are household wells to satisfy thirsty plants and trees. Elsewhere flowers have long since shrivelled in their beds, rose bushes hold their leafless branches up to the cloudless sky in brittle appeal for rain. A hosepipe ban has been in force for months. Still, hardy bougainvillea flower in saffron, red and purple profusion while scrubby olive trees secrete stunted fruit amongst their silver-green leaves.

Undaunted by the daily 40 degrees heat, the tourists flood in, fill the coastal hotels and holiday apartments and put even more strain on scarce resources. The farmers' 70 per cent share of the water for irrigation was cut by 75 per cent long ago. The government compensates them for their losses while fruit and vegetables are imported from Germany, Greece, France and Spain.

Some 100 reservoirs created by an elaborate system of dams are 90 per cent empty. The water will run out by the end of the year if the rains do not come.

In the meantime, Cyprus has had to fall back on bore holes (robbing the environment) supplemented by the production of a single desalination plant at Dhekelia, which opened in April 1997 and reached full capacity only in June. Since a second desalination plant will not be completed before 2000, the government is considering mobile facilities, including ships moored off the coast.

Cyprus is as much a victim of successful water management as of drought. After the 1974 Turkish occupation of the northern third of the island along with its water resources, the Greek Cypriot south worked hard to develop an independent water supply.

The water wizards did this by building a multitude of dams and constructing the impressive Southern Conveyor Project which carries water from the northern and western coastal areas to the dry south-east. The system worked fine until the rains failed. "It can't go on for a fourth year," is a common refrain. But it can: in ancient times the island's entire population was forced to migrate to Crete during a severe drought.

Across the Green Line that divides the island, the Turkish-Cypriots also suffer severe shortage. But last month Ankara began shipping water from the mainland in huge vinyl balloons. So far some 40,000 cubic metres have been delivered, precisely the amount produced every day by the Dhekelia desalination plant in the south; the flow from Turkey is to double this month.

For more than a decade Turkey has been considering an undersea pipeline. But since this will cost $160 million, Ankara may postpone a little longer in the hope that the rains will come.

The lack of water afflicts most of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Some West Bank villages have had no water in six months. And even the Muslim holy city of Mecca, the site of many rich springs, is short of water also.