Libya's beleaguered government faces water threat

Space Daily via UPI: Libya's fragile government, grappling with marauding militias that have virtually shut down the country's vital oil industry, has another big problem in its struggle to impose control -- water supplies.

Militants loyal to the late Moammar Gadhafi seized control of the Great Man-Made River, a $33 billion project that taps a vast acquifer under the Sahara desert to supply the entire country, Sept. 3. They did so to secure the release of the daughter of Gadhafi's former spy chief, Abdullah al-Senussi, who's scheduled to stand trial for crimes committed during Libya's eight-month civil war in 2011 that toppled Gadhafi.

What made it doubly embarrassing for the government was that Anoud al-Sanussi, 22, was snatched Sept. 2 in an ambush in the capital by elite forces as police escorted her to the airport to board a flight to Sebha, hundreds of miles south of Tripoli, to join relatives there.

The government of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan settled the issue and restored control of the water supplies by the end of last week after Senussi's daughter was released unharmed Sunday. She had been seized less than 100 yards from Tripoli's al-Rayoumi where she had served a 10-month sentence for entering Libya with a forged passport in October 2012....

Work on the Great Man-Made River in Libya, shot by Jaap Berk, public domain

Niger, Mali on alert for desert locust risk

Food and Agriculture Organization Media Center: Croplands in Niger and Mali are at imminent risk from Desert Locust swarms that are moving southward from Algeria and Libya, FAO warned today. Groups of locusts have recently been found in northern Niger, arriving from infestations further north.

FAO says locust-control efforts in the region are being hindered by continued insecurity along both sides of the Algerian-Libyan border. Political insecurity and conflict in Mali could also hamper monitoring and control efforts if the locusts reach that country.

Locust infestations were first reported in southwest Libya near Ghat in January 2012 and in southeast Algeria.  In late March, FAO warned that swarms could arrive in Niger and Mali by June. Continued rains and the resulting growth of vegetation led to the formation of swarms by mid-May.

“How many locusts there are and how far they move will depend on two major factors – the effectiveness of current control efforts in Algeria and Libya and upcoming rainfall in the Sahel of West Africa,” said Keith Cressman, FAO Senior Locust Forecasting Officer.

Both Algeria and Libya have been working hard to treat infested areas, covering a total of 40 000 hectares in Algeria and 21 000 hectares in Libya as of the end of May.

"In a normal year, Algeria and Libya would have been able to control most of the local swarms and prevent their movement towards the south, but insecurity along both sides of the Algerian-Libyan border is getting in the way of full access by local teams and by FAO experts who need to assess the situation. Libya’s capacity to carry out control efforts has also been affected in the past year,” Cressman explained...

A desert locust, shot by AtelierMonpli, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Libya fallout worsens Sahel hunger pangs as crisis looms

Terra Daily via AFP: Sahel states are bracing for a long, potentially deadly hungry season, many weakened by the return of people from Libya who are unemployed, armed and creating fresh strife in already-vulnerable countries.

Crops have failed across a massive swathe of eight countries after late and erratic rains in 2011, and aid agencies have raised the alarm of a food crisis bigger than that which left millions hungry in 2010.

However this semi-arid belt running across Africa, separating Sahara from savannah, has had several new shocks which are aggravating the crisis.

As the rains dried up, so too did remittances from oil-rich Libya where many in this zone went to work, explains Grant Leaity, regional chief of emergency for the United Nations children's agency UNICEF....

Libya and the five other original founders of Community of Sahel-Saharan States (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, Sudan) as of 1998

Libya warns of disaster if 'Great Man-Made River' hit

Terra Daily via AFP: Libya warned on Sunday that NATO-led air strikes could cause a "human and environmental disaster" if they damaged the country's massive Great Man-Made River (GMMR) project. Built at a cost of 33 billion dollars, the GMMR extracts water from deep beneath the Sahara desert at a depth of between 500 and 800 metres (1,600 to 2,500 feet), purifies it and transports it to the coastal cities of the north where most of the population is concentrated.

Engineer and project manager Abdelmajid Gahoud told foreign journalists in the ultra-modern control centre on the outskirts of Tripoli, that a "human and environmental disaster" was on the cards if the GMMR was hit.

He said three pipelines, one for gas, one for oil and another for water, run underground parallel to the 400-kilometre-long (248 miles) road from the eastern city of Benghazi to Moamer Kadhafi's home town of Sirte, through the area between Ajdabiya and Sirte where there have been many coalition air raids.

"If one of the pipelines is hit, the others are affected as well, which could mean a humanitarian catastrophe," Gahoud said....

NASA from 2006, a false-color w:ASTER image of the w:Grand Omar Mukhtar reservoir, part of the w:Great Manmade River project in Libya. Water (dark blue) residing in reservoirs appears twice in this image, in the upper right and at the bottom. Vegetation appears red. Cityscape structures such as pavement and buildings appear in gray. Bare ground appears tan or beige.