SHUNAT, Jordan -- Ibrahim el-Adwan has almost everything a farmer in the Jordan River valley could want: good soil, willing workers and modern irrigation equipment.
But none of those does him much good. He doesn't have water.
Jordan has been paying him not to plant 90 percent of his fields, even though winter is the prime growing season. Until this winter's heavy rains, Jordan could provide water for irrigation or drinking water for its cities but not both.
Mr. Adwan's land, like much of the Middle East, is in danger of running dry within a decade. If that happens, many of the issues that plague those trying to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict could become relatively extraneous.
Water is as central as the land itself to the region's disputes. It is considered worth fighting for. Water is what makes land worth having in a region that is mostly desert.
If the Arab-Israeli peace process resuming in Moscow today is to succeed, the parties must decide who rightfully owns certain lands. They must determine at the same time who has rights to the water that lies underground, flows in the rivers and collects in lakes and reservoirs. Then they must decide how to share it.
Failure to reach agreement could leave the region inside a decade with barely enough water to meet the most basic needs of its population, and none left over for growth.
Without an agreement for sharing existing supplies, there is little chance for agreement on obtaining the new, costly supplies that water experts say are crucial.
"Almost everything that can be taken from the system has been taken," says Hillel Shuval, an Israeli hydrologist and consultant to the World Bank. "All the countries of this region are going to be in water stress."
If they are not to go thirsty, states can cooperate or resign themselves to the prospect of another war, one to be fought over water.
Mr. Shuval forecasts: "They will enter a level of water stress that does not allow rational functioning."
Water is supposed to be on the agenda in Moscow. The meeting would be a major success if it did nothing more than solve the problems of Mr. Adwan.
He owns 250 acres of land in the valley that is the richest agricultural area in the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. In winter, the temperature is appropriate for a beach resort; in summer, it is furnace-like.
The sunshine is year-round. Given enough water, a farmer could plant and harvest the vegetables of his choice three times a year.
Part of Mr. Adwan's water comes from a government irrigation project, the East Ghor Canal. He is fortunate in that most of his supply comes from several wells owned by his family; fortunate because until the winter rains, the canal was nearly empty. He resorted to pumping more from the wells. Not surprisingly, the water levels began to drop.
He isn't helped by living alongside the Jordan River. Disputes among Jordan, Syria and Israel over rights to its tributaries have left barely enough flow to keep the river looking wet. It already is overused by parties grabbing as much as they can.
Mr. Adwan cannot depend on rainfall because drought has been the rule three of the last four years. He also cannot look to help from Amman, the capital, where drinking water is rationed from late spring to mid-autumn. Jordan has built a pipeline to divert water from the East Ghor Canal to Amman, but rarely has the water to fill it.
Mr. Adwan says he knows who to blame for the problems -- "It's God and the Israelis."
"Rains come from the heavens," he says, pointing a finger toward the sky, "and then Israel takes water from the river."
Israel is on the other side of the river, where people see the problem differently. They blame Jordan's problems on Jordan. Or they blame bad water management by everyone, including themselves.
Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank blame their water problems on Jews who have settled the occupied territory. Everyone, though, eventually reaches the conclusion that serious shortages are imminent.
Water experts have a measure for the region's distress. They define a water-rich society as one with 2,000 cubic meters of water a year for each person. (A cubic meter contains 262 gallons.) That is considered enough to meet domestic, industrial and farming needs for a modern society, plus a comfortable surplus.
By that standard, most of the Middle East is water-poor. Jordan has about 300 cubic meters a person. The figure for Israel is the same. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have 165. In the United States, the figure is about 4,000.
In the past
Shortages used to elicit a simple response. When an oasis went dry in the desert, when rains failed in the hills, when the heat became unbearable in the valley, people folded their tents and left.
"That was our history," says Omar Joudeh, a Jordanian water specialist working for the United Nations. "When there was a drought for a few years, people moved."
Nomadic life does not work for a modern state, however, and arguments over water escalated as the map of the region began to take its current form after the European victors of World War I redrew maps to suit their own political and economic interests.
Engineers in the area that became Jordan drafted plans in the 1930s and 1940s for capturing waters from the upper reaches of the Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee. Planners in the area of Palestine that became Israel based their own development program on the use of those same waters.
Israel and its Arab neighbors fought the first of their all-out wars in 1948, and the cease-fire lines left water resources divided. Syria controlled the main tributaries to the Jordan River, in the Golan Heights. Jordan controlled most of the river's length. Israel held the Sea of Galilee, the largest river-fed lake.
Efforts began as soon as the fighting stopped to change the division. Israel studied how to capture more of the water for itself, while Jordan and Syria agreed to build a dam to generate electricity -- and reduce water flow to the Galilee.
In the early 1950s, the United States sought to mediate by proposing a vast development program for both sides of the valley and asking Israel, Jordan and Syria to take only agreed-upon amounts of water. Three years of efforts failed to produce a formula acceptable to everyone, and the parties began carrying out their own, very different interpretations of the U.S. plan.
Engineers in Israel built a series of pumping stations and pipelines carrying water from the Sea of Galilee to the population centers on the Mediterranean coast and south to the Negev desert. Jordan began planning the water system that became the East Ghor Canal.
Syria began work to divert two tributaries of the river, and Israel responded by firing artillery at the bulldozers. When that failed, aircraft bombed the site in 1966.
Control of the waters shifted again in the 1967 Six Day War, the event that drew most of today's borders and ensured the water issue would come back to haunt the combatants. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria along with control of the main tributaries of the river. It also captured the West Bank from Jordan and thereby obtained effective control of the river.
Both sides of the river valley were in turmoil. Israel was anxious to secure its hold on the West Bank. Jordan was confronted with a large refugee population needing work and food. For both countries, the solution was to encourage agriculture in the valley. It would attract people and give them useful work. Not incidentally, the establishment of new communities also would help secure the borders.
Water was to be the magnet -- cheap water. Jordanian farmers using water from the East Ghor Canal pay about 1 cent for one cubic meter that costs the kingdom about 45 cents. In Israel, farmers have paid about 16 cents a cubic meter for water whose real cost is 35 cents.
Those policies succeeded all too well. Farmers established themselves on both sides of the river and planted bananas and melons -- crops requiring large amounts of water -- because water was cheap.
They kept planting, and populations began to grow at rates that double every 20 to 30 years. And, inevitably, demand for water began to exceed supplies.
"With the population we have, we can't afford irrigated agriculture the way we practice it," says Elias Salameh, director of the Water Research and Study Center at the University of Jordan. "The whole economy is going to have to be reformed."
Israeli experts concur in the need to change farming methods, if ever-increasing numbers of people are to have water to drink. A government study of Israel's water problems blamed shortages on the quantities devoted to agriculture. "The water crisis," the study concluded, "is not a result of natural causes; it is man-made."
New sources of water
There are several potential solutions, but none of them is practical until all the parties establish a durable peace. Otherwise they will find it impossible to obtain the necessary financing from abroad and have reason to fear that any new water project automatically will become a prime military target.
While none of the potential new sources of water is revolutionary in technology, all would require a revolutionary degree of political cooperation:
* Desalination. It is one of the most expensive, but most readily available sources for additional water. With existing technology, desalination plants purify sea water for a minimum of $1.50 to $2 a cubic meter, three times the highest price paid in the region today.
The largest single expense is the oil or natural gas used to run the plants, and those costs are likely eventually to rise. Some experts propose Israel and Jordan depend on other solutions for the next 20 to 30 years in hopes that by then, improvements in technology will lower the costs.
* Water from Turkey. At various times, Turkish officials have proposed selling their own surpluses by the tankerfull to Israel or building a 350-mile-long pipeline to carry it to Syria and Jordan.
While sales to Israel have not been ruled out, no country will let itself become dependent on another state for water to meet basic needs. Even less acceptable is dependence on a pipeline crossing several borders and liable to cut at any point.
Leaders can cite sobering experience from 1991, when Saudi Arabia and Turkey obeyed the orders of the United Nations by cutting off pipelines transporting oil from Iraq. A pipeline project for water could succeed only with international guarantees that supplies could not be interrupted -- but there might always be doubts.
* The "Unity" dam. Jordan and Syria have been seeking financing from the World Bank for more than a decade to build a dam on the Yarmuk River, the only remaining Jordan River tributary with water to spare. A hydroelectric plant there would generate electricity for Syria and the reservoir would supply drinking and irrigation water to Jordan.
Israel must agree to the project before the World Bank will give its approval. U.S. officials are conducting private talks to try to reassure Israel that its rights to the Yarmuk will not be harmed -- and apparently to try to expand a potential agreement on the Unity dam into an accord on other water issues.
None of those projects is a lasting solution. A dam or a desalination plant, at best, will buy the states of the region time to change agricultural practices and population policies -- and to learn to cooperate with each other.
If each party reduces its water demands, each party will have less reason to covet waters of the others, and be less tempted to take desperate, violent measures.
"I'm interested that my kids and their kids can live in this country," says Mr. Salameh, the Jordanian water specialist. The best way to assure that they can, he says, "is to learn that water is something we should equitably share."
TOMORROW: A Palestinian village and an Israeli settlement vie for water.