TEHRAN, Oct 5, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Iran faces losing 70 percent of its
farmlands if urgent action is not taken to overcome a litany of climate woes,
the country’s environment chief Isa Kalantari told AFP.
The Islamic Republic is grappling not only with air, water and soil
pollution, as well as drought and desertification, but also with the effect
of years of crippling US and international sanctions.
Adding to the dire situation, “we currently use about 100 percent of our
renewable water … according to global standards this figure should not be
higher than 40 percent,” said Kalantari, vice president and head of Iran’s
Environment Department, in an exclusive interview in Tehran.
“The excessive consumption of water, especially from groundwater is a
threat and could have terrible social consequences,” he warned.
If the situation is not brought under control, then “we would lose about
70 percent of our cultivated land in a maximum of 20 to 30 years.”
“The south of Alborz and east of Zagros, if we don’t take swift action,
will become unusable for agriculture,” Kalantari added.
Alborz and Zagros are mountain ranges in the north and west of Iran
respectively. The majority of Iran’s mostly arid land mass and population
centres are located to the south and east of them.
According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, Iran, a country
of some 80 million people, predominantly relies on agriculture.
– Past errors –
Kalantari said there had been many years of mismanagement of water
resources, and mistaken decisions forced by political and economic concerns
such as the US sanctions and climate change.
“We basically thought that environment was not that important,” he said.
Other countries had also failed to address climate issues introducing
policy errors in the 1960s and 1970s. “We made these mistakes in the 1980s.
Then we came to realise that in places that we’d built dams, we shouldn’t
have built any, and in places where we should have built dams, we didn’t
build any,” he said.
The pressure on the country’s resources has also been exacerbated by
population growth, with Iranians encouraged to have large families in the
years following its 1979 Islamic revolution.
“In the first decade after the revolution, we encountered a high
population growth rate, more than three percent annually,” Kalantari said.
This policy was taken “without paying attention to utilising and
improving” the use of resources, he said.
He also highlighted the effects of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), when the
country was isolated and could not concern itself with sustainable
development as it had a burgeoning population to feed.
“Iran could not, and cannot, bear the pressure that this (population
growth) exerted on the consumption of water, for the supply of food and for
agriculture,” he added.
The strain has shown recently with Iranians taking to the streets in
December and January this year, protesting over economic conditions.
A former agriculture minister in the 1990s, Kalantari said Iran could not
be self-sufficient in food production for its estimated 80 million people “if
we want sustainable policies”.
Even with state-of-the-art technology, Iran could only be completely self-
sufficient to supply food for 50 to 55 million people.
– Sanctions hit –
He also blamed some of the country’s air pollution woes on biting
sanctions.
“Locally-produced car engines are not up to standard, so when sanctions
are imposed, car manufacturers such as Peugeot and Renault depart,” said
Kalantari. The two carmakers suspended operations in Iran after Washington
withdrew from a ground-breaking nuclear deal earlier this year and reimposed
sanctions, as European leaders have so far failed to gain any exemptions for
their firms.
A lack of new cars prompts Iranians to “use domestically-made engines”
which do not adhere to modern environmental standards.
The resulting pollution frequently hangs heavily over the capital Tehran,
with smog often rendering the mountains to the north invisible, while there
have been growing cases of people hospitalised with respiratory problems.