Turkey invests to address water shortage: Erdoğan

ANKARA

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on March 29 pledged to make further investment in the water management of Turkey and said they want to adopt a law focusing on the issue.

“In the coming period, we are preparing a water law in the parliament to prevent conflicts of authority in water management,” he said, addressing the first Water Council mass launching ceremony.

“We are not a country rich in water. We are a country suffering from water stress,” he said, noting that Turkey has to share the limited water resources with two neighbors Iraq and Syria.

“There is no difference in terms of entourage between protecting our water and protecting our homeland,” Erdoğan said.

But Turkey has never used the water issue as a threat in bilateral relations, he added.

The country’s agricultural production increased by 20 percent compared to the previous year and reached 334 billion Turkish Liras, he said.

“Our leadership in the agricultural production in Europe continues,” the president noted.

In 2021, the government will provide a total of 24 billion Lira agricultural support to the producers, he stated.

“We broke the records of the history of the republic in agricultural production despite the pandemic and meteorological drought in the period we left behind,” Erdoğan asserted.

Turkey needs to renew its agricultural irrigation systems and use its existing resources more efficiently by encouraging individual saving, Erdoğan said.

In the last 19 years, the government has built 8,697 new facilities and planned the drinking and utility water needs of our cities until 2040, 2050 and 2071, he said.

They conjoined Asia and Europe with a 5,551-meter-long giant water tunnel with a diameter of 4 meters, built 26 underground dams, he said while pledging to increase the number of underground dams to 150 by 2023.

The government is investing heavily in water treatment technology and to take the necessary measures for the efficient use of water in the industrial sector, he said, noting that they aim to increase the irrigation efficiency from 46 percent to 55 percent by 2024.

“After the great drought in 2007, we prepared drinking water action plans for our 81 provinces. We will continue to invest in all these areas in the upcoming period,” he stated.