Dwindling farm water threatens Turkish disaster

An environmental catastrophe is threatening central Turkey, once the country's breadbasket, where farmers are depleting the water table after the hottest summer in living memory.

A shepherd since his childhood, 60-year-old Kamil Gurel reckoned he knew the terrain on the southern edge of Turkey's vast Konya plain as well as anyone. Until one moonless night recently, when walking his flocks back home, he fell at least 40 metres down a sink-hole that hadn't been there the week before.

Luckily, he survived. But like the dozens of other sink-holes to have formed in recent decades, the chasm Mr Gurel fell into is "a warning sign of an impending catastrophe", according to Tahir Nalbantcilar, the head of the Chamber of Geological Engineers in the regional capital of Konya.

On the Konya plain – an area more than twice the size of Wales that stretches south from Ankara almost all the way to the Mediterranean – water is the region's biggest problem.

Mr Nalbantcilar described it as a matter of simple arithmetic. Devoid of rivers, hemmed in by mountains on all sides, the plain has no source of water other than groundwater. For the past 40 years, farmers have sucked it up faster than rain can replenish it. The result is a water table that is sinking fast.

"We used to pull water by hand out of wells five metres deep," said Tahsin Ata, a farmer in the small village of Cirali, up the road from Mr Gurel's sink-hole. "Now you have to go 80 metres down."

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