Morocco: Addressing water scarcity

For the past few years, water stress has been accelerated world wide - with more severity in the Middle East North African region (MENA). Simultaneously, the economic boom of countries like Morocco has triggered a faster water demand that more likely will not be coped with, given the limited resources that the country has, and for this reason importing water is an imperative necessity.

This paper assesses two technologies to mitigate the water scarcity in Morocco and therefore enhance its economic performance. These include polyethylene bags filled with water to be towed from Turkey and the intercontinental water pipeline that will transport water from the Amazon river in Brazil. A cost-benefit analysis is implemented to evaluate how feasible both technologies are, from an economic perspective, considering factors such as the GDP growth due to water availability and the advantages that both approaches imply. The service provision and its characteristics of affordability, environmental protection and predictability are also considered from a public perspective in the analysis.

The main findings after comparing the two technologies show that it is cheaper to import water with the polyethylene bags but the source of the intercontinental water pipeline tends to be more reliable in terms of volume, but the risk for such infrastructure is higher in terms of potential security issues.