AFP - Turkish President Abdullah Gul on Wednesday urged his country's businessmen to invest in Jordan's water sector as he opened offices for a huge Turkish-managed scheme to supply Amman with water.

"Turkish businessmen should increase their investments and cooperation with Jordan in the water field," Gul said as he inaugurated the headquarters for the Disi water plan, which is being carried out by the Turkish firm GAMA Energy.

The 990-million-dollar project seeks to extract 100 million cubic metres (3.5 billion cubic feet) of water a year from the 300,000-year-old Disi aquifer, 325 kilometres (200 miles) south of Amman.

Infrastructure work on the much-delayed plan in the desert kingdom was launched in 2008 and is expected to take around four years.

"The company should complete the project in line with the agreed timetable," Gul said in Qastal, 20 kilometres (more than 12 miles) south of Amman, after he and Prime Minister Nader Dahabi cut the ribbon on the headquarters.

The project includes using 250,000 tonnes of steel and digging 55 wells to pump water from Disi to Amman, where the per capita daily consumption of its 2.2-million population stands at 160 litres (42 gallons).

"Regional cooperation is a must to tackle water issues," said Gul, who will wrap up his three-day visit to Jordan on Thursday.

"Turkey, which suffers from water problems, is open to any kind of cooperation on water."

Jordan, which consumes more than 900 million cubic metres (31.5 billion cubic feet) every year, is one of the 10 most water-impoverished countries in the world, and depends mainly on rain to meet its needs.

The water ministry says the tiny kingdom, where 92 percent of the land is desert, will need 1.6 billion cubic metres (56 billion cubic feet) of water a year to meet its requirements by 2015.

"The Disi project will not solve Jordan's chronic water shortage," Minister of Water and Irrigation Raed Abu Saud said at the ceremony.

"It will just make the water situation stable until the Red-Dead Canal project is built."

He was referring to a multi-billion dollar plan to build a canal to channel water from the Red Sea to the slowly evaporating Dead Sea and construct a desalination plant, providing Jordan with 500 million cubic metres (17.5 billion cubic feet) of water annually.