Cash it. Just found this article about Jordan's Badia region. The author pals around with the same folks from the Badia Research and Development Center that I did last summer, including our SIT Academic Director Ra'ed al-Tabini, who was working for the BRDC at the time of the article's printing. OK, so it's not a hard-hitting, crticial piece, but I enjoyed reading it. Here are a few interesting selections (pictures are mine):


Small villages slid past us: simple, square concrete houses; outside them were tents, and flocks of sheep and goats. Most of the inhabitants were settled Bedouins, said al-Rawajfeh, but many of them prefer to sleep in the tents and use the houses—dry, secure and rodent-proof—for storage. They earn their livings farming and keeping livestock or working for the government or the military, and they send their children to village schools. They buy wheat and barley for their flocks, but many of them return to the desert each spring to let their animals forage. The manner of this return often involves phone calls to friends around the country to find out where the rains have been good, then loading the flocks into trucks and setting off, accompanied by a tank truck of water, for the newly greened areas.

...

Every aspect of livestock breeding is under study by the Badia Program. Roger Oakley is here as an economist. "Things are sort of stacked against the Badia people," he said. "You cannot produce sheep as cheaply here as in Australia. Even in Syria and Iraq the grazing is better. So far, the Australians have produced and exported merino sheep, which have a different flavor and therefore didn't threaten the market for sheep from the Badia. Now they're starting to raise the awassi breed, the same as here. Once the Aussies start large-scale production, the Jordanian producers are going to have bigger problems.

"Realistically, from a hard economic point of view," he added, "it is not very sustainable out here, like it or not."

...

The little lake at Burqu' is a an example. It contains up to a million cubic meters of water (more than 800 acre-feet) in a region where annual evaporation exceeds three meters, and there is water here even in the driest years. The Nabataeans built the waterworks, the Romans built a fort, and the place was used in Byzantine and early Islamic times. The remains of what is said to be an Umayyad hunting lodge stand at the water's edge—and so do Bedouins' tank trucks, sucking up water for sheep and goats. The only other visitors are migrating birds by the thousands, in their season.