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From: Reuters
Published March 1, 2008 07:26 PM
http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/32096
By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent
BEIT HUJAIRA, Yemen (Reuters) - Black-clad women trudge across a stony plateau in the Yemeni highlands to haul water in yellow plastic cans from wells that will soon dry up.
"We come here three or four times a day," says Adiba Sena, as another woman draws water six metres (20 feet) to the surface and pours it into jerry cans lashed to her grey donkey. "We use it to clean, cook, wash -- we have no pipes that reach us."
These women are at the sharp end of what Yemen's water and environment minister describes as a collapse of national water resources so severe it cannot be reversed, only delayed at best.
"This is almost inevitable because of the geography and climate of Yemen, coupled with uncontrolled population growth and very low capacity for managing resources," the minister, Abdul-Rahman al-Iryani, told Reuters in an interview.
...
Staving off disaster on this scale would challenge even a richer nation. For Yemen, where 45 percent of the population survives on less than $2 a day, the odds are much worse.
Nearly 75 percent of Yemenis still live in the countryside, but an accelerating drift to the cities has overwhelmed urban utilities, including water. Sanaa has mushroomed to more than 2 million people from just 60,000 in the 1940s.