Podcast from my latest piece on the Qatari fishing industry

My interview starts 13:50 or so; no mistaking the voice.

My latest published piece on the numbers behind obesity

Click on the magazine above to read my latest bit of data-driven journalism: a piece on how food supply chains impacts the lifestyles and wellbeing of the people living in the GCC.

My article starts on page 45! 

Drinking the Desert: First of a New Series

A news story carried by the Gulf Times last year shed light on the consumption of water by Qatar residents. The Gulf Times points out that Qatar has a greater proportionate reliance on desalinated water than even other GCC states such as Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates; in Qatar, 75% of the water consumed comes from desalinated sources. (I was frankly surprised to learn that it was not higher). Some of the much more clear-cut statistics can be difficult to locate, but I found this very interesting presentation on the website of Qatar's Ministry of Planning and Statistics. One of the important things to keep in mind is that more than 93% of the water consumed by Qatari households comes from the municipal desalination plants, a costly and environmentally damaging affair.

One fact that I found interesting to the point of being disturbing was that agriculture, a fringe activity in the country, accounts for nearly as much water usage as its nearly two million inhabitants. The agriculture sector's reliance on groundwater resources also places huge strains on the country's existing network of aquifers, which it shares with Bahrain, Kuwait and of course Saudi Arabia. This reliance on the underground water resources of Qatar further drives up the existing aquifers' salinity, one of the themes which I hope to explore in the coming three or four blog posts after such a long hiatus! 

Doing Stats on Solar Energy

So I've jumped on the online education bandwagon and started taking Delft University Online's "Introduction to Solar Energy". If you ever thought that you were "good" at the physical sciences, but then spent a decade plus in the wilderness, then taking a course like this will likely be a shock to your system and will probably knock your understanding of the world. That was my experience anyway; but whatever, it's pretty cool because you really need nothing more than some basic integral calculus to do it. 

One of the questions posed online provided the table below, stating area of landmass, solar irradiaiton which the country receives (see definition of "sun hours" below) and energy consumption for a set of five countries chosen seemingly arbitrarily. 

Source: edX course on Solar Energy run by Delft University and taught by Arno Smets. 

So my first act as a student was to look up what a "sun hour" actually is: turns out there is such a measure, and that it's equivalent to 1 kWh per meter²; in SI units, 3.6 million Joules per meter ² . My homework assignment--for which the answers are fairly straightforward and completely unsurprising--was to figure out which country needed to cover the greatest proportion of its landmass to photovoltaic cells if it wanted to satisfy all of its electricity needs from solar energy alone. Note that, to answer the question, you can ignore caveats to do with the efficiency of photovoltaics (which seem to always be 15% in the textbooks) or what the conversion factor is for solar irradiation to electricity, or even the conversion from DC to AC. In the shower this morning, the question that came to my mind between shampoo and conditioner was: how does Qatar rank on these scores? 

One (advertorial?) source places the amount which Qatar receives as 1,858 kWh per year as an average, making the daily rate not much more than India's (surprised? I was), and twice that of Britain's (really thought it would be more ...). Of course, Qatar also has a tiny surface area: not much more than about 11,000 km² (or so I estimated). 

As you would expect, Qatar's electricity consumption jumped in tandem with its population in the years from 2006 to 2012; at 18.79 billion kWh (source: Index Mundi). When you plug the numbers in, it's also clear that on the count of "energy consumption per unit of area" (something I kind of made up, I think), Qatar tops all of these countries: 

Country	Energy Consumption per Unit Area
United States	14,237
India	10,503
Brazil	1,926
Spain	19,031
UK	50,938
Qatar	61,494

...and by a mile. FWIW: Qatar, while receiving twice as much solar energy per unit area in comparison to the UK, would need, proportionately, six times as much of its landmass as India converted to photovoltaic cells to satisfy all of its electricity needs from solar energy. 

Just like with the hamour fish, we're consuming far, far too much electricity. 

Hamour | Redux

It's been too long since I've posted here ... and, sadly, this post is going to be fairly quick. (There will be more soon though, I promise; I was recently given a gold mine of statistical data which I plan to dig into). 

ICYMI: yesterday's Peninsula, an English language daily in Qatar, had a front page story on the declining hamour stocks. The piece makes no mention of the amount of hamour catches in tonnage (for that, see my piece here). It does, however, discuss the prices for both wholesale and retail hamour catches. Interestingly, the retail markup for hamour is much lower than it is for fish which are actually much less threatened: wholesale to retail for Kanaad, the local kingfish, is QAR 40 to 70, or 75%; for hamour, this is QAR 80 to 100, or 20%. Clearly, traders are beginning to understand that there are upper limits to how much they can charge for hamour, and are giving in to the fact that it is very much in demand.  

So, like I said, this is kind of a very quick revisit of my earlier post on the hamour dying out ... since I have the 2008 Qatar Labour Force Survey however, it shouldn't be much longer until my next, more data-rich post! 

GDP: Not the Same as Wealth

I remember having started a new job in Doha where my then-boss came out with a real gem. "This is", he said, "the richest country in the world", and then pointed to some recently published figures on GDP per capita. Of course, there are a number of well-documented criticisms of the reliability of Gross Domestic Product data and the ways in which it is collected. What this instance also highlights, however, is the common misconception of GDP as a measure of "wealth". It was not at all comfortable to have to explain that GDP was about measuring the amount of economic activity within a specific country at a given period of time. 

I was reminded of this--fairly common--misapprehension earlier today when I came across some more recent World Bank data on Twitter, which you can find here. According to the stats, Qatar ranks third worldwide for per capita GDP, after only Luxembourg and Norway. (Note the preponderance of countries with small populations and large reserves of natural resources at the top of this list.)

It's not difficult to see how this might have nothing at all with what we think of as "wealth": the aggregate of the purchasing activity within a given economy over a given period of time. Every time chocolate bar, car, haircut and meal you buy counts towards this. Obviously, in Qatar, the contributions to this economic activity will come in the form of mega-scale infrastructure projects. These don't only include the World Cup 2022, but also the upcoming rail network--Qatar Rail was the largest single client in the GCC during 2013--and road reconstruction, and the upcoming Doha zoo. In fact, the railway construction contracts alone are the equivalent of just about 4% of Qatar's Gross Domestic Product in 2013.  

Clearly, none of this is what people think of when they think of the phrase "richest country in the world": what they want to know is, usually, how many people in said country can drive fancy cars? An indication of this is given by the median income. 

Here, the data which I found were unfortunately dated by at least seven years, but somehow were published in 2013 (I know some more recent data exist, so please get in touch if you have them). Yet the figures provided in the Peninsula article here seem to be very inflated when you consider the armies of blue collar labourers who make this country possible; other data from the ILO point to a much lower average wage of US$ 1,700 or so per month for Qatar. While, again, a mean (average) and a median are not the same, they should tend to the same limit in a well-distributed Gaussian curve. A very indicative fact is that while the other two countries which help Qatar make up the top of the list for the biggest GDP per capita--Norway and Luxembourg--are at the top of ILO list for average monthly income, Qatar here ranks at number 29--right after Turkey. 

Population Bursts and the Consumption of Hamour (Better late than never ...)

I'm sure the scores of you who started visiting this blog over the past two weeks started to worry that I might never post again. Fear not. There is a lot to say about Qatari fish stocks, and other things; and so, while I have a lot of pressing things to take care of at the moment--other fish to fry, if you will--I did want to share a few charts I cooked up to elaborate on something I'd mentioned earlier. 

As is well documented, Qatar's dramatic population surge over the past decade or so has been driven largely by the burgeoning growth of inward migration to the country. While the data from the Ministry of Environment (see previous posts) show no major increase in the numbers of fishermen or fishing boats over the last decade, what they do show is a huge rise in the amount of fish caught. 

To give a very crude visualisation of how these two are related, see below: 

The catch per fisherman of fish, overall, rose in tandem with the rapidly expanding expatriate population. 

To put this more simply, we have: 

Amount of fish caught per fisherman in Qatari waters.

What the figures show is more than just the obvious "more people eat more fish", but rather that the amount of fish caught by individual fishermen, on average, shot up at around the same time that the population was growing. Although this does not show statistical correlation, it does demonstrate a fairly intuitive idea: that large numbers of protein-hungry foreigners are moving here and, landing on a fish which tastes a bit like a cod, find it irresistible. One more plot for today can be found below.