The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
"A lake, once almost 10 miles around and 25 feet deep at its
center, not to mention its accompanying ecosystem and economy, has
vanished."
Common Language Project (CLP): "Harar Beer Brewery irresponsibly used and polluted Haramaya's water."
"Farmers have been blamed for what has happened to the lake, but
others share the responsibility. A brewery used lake water
to make beer, the city of Harar used Haramaya as its primary source of
drinking water. Climate change has only made things worse."
The Death of A Lake: Nobody Took Care of It
"We need to green our politics, because right now development
is happening at the expense of the environment."
Lake Haramaya (in Oromia), once more than 10 miles around and
30 feet deep in places, was not a huge lake. But for decades it
provided water for Harar, one of Islam's holy cities with a
population today of about 100,000. Nearby Haramaya University
was named for the lake and a still active university website
says the campus overlooks "beautiful Lake Haramaya." But the
website is dated 2000. Back then, fishermen worked the lake and
farmers relied on it to irrigate their fields.
Now Harar gets by on water drawn from what remains of an
underground pool beneath Lake Haramaya's bone-dry basin as it
awaits completion of a new system that will pipe water from 30
miles away.
The new system will not provide water for the region's farms.
Some farmers have found water by drilling into Lake Haramaya's
dry basin. But they have had to buy pumps. Farmers without extra
money have watched their crops suffer. Most of the
fishermen have moved to another shrinking lake over the next
range of rolling hills.
Like most who had a front row seat for Lake Haramaya's
destruction, Moges readily presents a long list of guilty
parties. He says that Harar Beer Brewery irresponsibly used
and polluted Haramaya's water, and he resents farmers who
took the lake for granted. But he seems most disillusioned
by an apathetic government that stood by and let it happen.
The region's chat revolution in relatively recent. Twenty
years ago this area was committed to growing staple food crops
by the communist Derg government. When a less centrally
dictatorial government came to power in the mid-1990s local
farmers became free to follow the market, which led them
straight to chat.
In many ways it has been good to the area. The local economy
has grown alongside the lucrative mono cash crop. Tacky chat
mansions with blue reflective glass windows and oversized
columns rise from the landscape, and the towns along newly
constructed Harar Road are bustling.
But chat is a mixed blessing. Most problematic are its long,
anchored roots which require concentrated watering. This demand
is intensified by chat's ability, with heavy irrigation, to
produce multiple harvests throughout the year. International
chat prices skyrocket during the dry season, meaning that the
motivation among farmers for water use is strongest when the
land is least capable of providing.
"You see, in order to grow chat, in order to irrigate chat
you need to extract lots and lots of water, and water is
free,"says Dr. Tena Alamirew, Academic and Research Vice
President of Haramaya University, which sits beside the empty
lake.
"During the Communist regime there was the law of common
property—nobody was thought to own the water so everybody just
took out however much they want," says Professor Tena,. "Today,
as long as they can fuel their pumps it's still all free, so
nobody gave even the slightest attention until the end, until
the very last moment."
