Growing up in Israel in the 1960's, we were always urged toconserve precious water. Rainfall was rare and meager, the sunscorching, our only sweet water lake under constant threat bythe Syrians. Israelis were being shot at hauling water cisternsor irrigating their parched fields. Water was a matter of lifeand death - literally.
Drought often conspires with man-made disasters. Macedoniaexperienced its second worst dry spell during the civil strifeof last year. Benighted Afghanistan is having one now - repletewith locusts. Rapid, unsustainable urbanization,desertification, exploding populations, and economic growth,especially of water-intensive industries, such as microprocessorfabs - all contribute to the worst water crisis the world hasever known.
Governments reacted late, hesitantly, and haltingly. Waterconservation, desalination, water rights exchanges, water pacts,private-public partnerships, and privatization of utilities(e.g., in Argentina and the UK) - may have been implemented toolittle, too late.
Rising incomes lead to the exertion of political pressure on theauthorities by civic movements and NGO's to improve waterquality and availability. But can the authorities help?According to the World Bank, close to $600 billion will beneeded by 2010 just to augment existing reserves and to improvewater grade levels.
The UNDP believes that half the population in Africa will besubject to wrenching water shortages in 25 years. Theenvironmental research institute, Worldwatch, quoted by the BBC,recommends food imports as a way to economize on water.
It takes 1000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain andagriculture consumes almost 70 percent of the world's water -though only less than 30 percent in OECD countries. It takesmore than the entire throughput of the Nile to grow the grainimported annually by Middle Eastern and North African countriesalone. Some precipitation-poor countries even grow cotton andrice, both insatiable crops. By 2020, says the World WaterCouncil, we will be short 17 percent of the water that would beneeded to feed the population.
The USA withdraws one fifth of its total resources annually -proportionately, one half of Belgium's drawdown. But accordingto the OECD, Americans are the most profligate consumers offresh water, more than double the OECD's average in the 1990's.Britain and Denmark have actually reduced their utilization by20 percent between 1980 and 1996 - probably due to sharp andominous drops in their water tables.
Stratfor, a strategic forecasting firm, reported on May 14 thatMexico and the USA are in the throes of a conflict over Mexico's"failure to live up to its water supply commitments under a 1944treaty", which allocates water from the Colorado, Rio Concho,and Rio Grande among the two signatories.
Mexico seems to have accumulated a daunting debt of 1.5 millionacre-feet over the last 8 years - the result of a decade longdrought. Each acre-foot is c. 1.2 million liters. Mexico'sreservoirs are less than 25 percent full. Some of the water,though, has been used to transform its borderland into a majorproducer of fresh vegetables for the American market - at theexpense of Texas farmers.
Faced with the worst drought in more than a century in somestates, the Bush administration has announced on May 3 that itis considering sanctions, including, perhaps the suspension ofwater supplies from the Colorado to Mexico. Texas lawmakersdemanded to re-open NAFTA and amend it punitively.
Mexico is a typical case. Only 9 percent of its streams andrivers are fit for drinking. Its underground water is almostequally polluted. Its infrastructure is crumbling, leading tosevere seepage of more than two fifths of the water. Half of therest evaporates in open canals.
Moreover, water is under-priced, thus encouraging wastefulconsumption, mainly by farmers. Stratfor cites an estimatepublished in the May 5 issue Fort Worth Star-Telegram - morethan $60 billion will be needed over the next decade torefurbish Mexico's urban and rural networks.
William K. Reilly, former administrator of the EPA, writing inthe "ITT Industries Guidebook to Global Water Issues", mentionsthe human cost of water scarcity: a million dead children ayear, a billion people without access to treated water, almostdouble this number without sanitation.
More than 11,000 people died in a cholera epidemic induced bypolluted water in Latin America in the 1990's. Every year,according to the World Bank, the amount of water polluted equalsthe quantity of water consumed. In many parts of the world,notably in Africa, people walk for hours to obtain theircontaminated daily water rations.
Water shortage hobbles industrial production in places asdiverse as Sicily and Malaysia. The lower estuaries of theYellow River - China's most important - are now dry two thirdsof the year. The water table beneath China's fertile northernplane is falling by 1.5 meters a year.
The drought in Sri Lanka is so severe and so prolonged that theInternational Red Cross had to intervene and launch an appealfor emergency funds. The Mekong River, which flows from China toVietnam, is being obstructed by 7 Chinese dams underconstruction. Once completed, its flow will be reduced by half.
Close to 200 million people in seven countries will be affected.In a retaliatory move, Laos is planning to hold back c. 70percent of its contribution to the Mekong by constructing 23dams. Thailand follows with 20 percent of its contribution and amere 4 dams. Vietnam is likely to pay the price of this "damwar". Thailand is sufficiently rich to simply buy the water itneeds from its truculent neighbors.
Australia is in no better shape. The diversion of Snowy Riverinland led to massive salinization of the lands it irrigates -Australia's bread basket. Many of the tributaries are now unfitfor either irrigation or drinking. In India, the holy river,Ganges, is depleted and impregnated with poisonous arsenic.
A long running dispute is simmering between India and Bangladeshregarding this dwindling lifeline, recent progress innegotiations notwithstanding. This is reminiscent of a lowintensity conflict that has been brewing along the banks of theNile between an assertive Egypt and the encroaching Sudan andEthiopia since the Nile Basin Initiative has been signed in 1993.
A July 2000 conference of the riparian states, backed by thelikes of the World Bank and the United Nations, eased thetension somewhat by promulgating a workable plan to redistributethe African river's throughput. The emphasis in the February2001 meeting of the International Consortium Cooperation on theNile, though, was on hydro-power over the contentious minefieldof water usage rights.
Turkey is constructing more than two dozen dams on the Tigrisand Euphrates within the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP).Once completed, Turkey will have the option to deprive bothSyria and Iraq of their main sources of water, though it vowednot to do so. In a cynical twist, it offers to sell them waterfrom its Manavgat river. Iraq's own rivers have shriveled byhalf. Still, this is the less virulent and violent of the waterconflicts in the Middle East.
Israel controls the Kinneret Sea of Galilee. It is the source ofone third of its water consumption. The rest it pumps fromrivers in the region, to the vocal dismay of Syria, Lebanon, andJordan. Despite decades of indoctrination, Israelis arewater-guzzlers. They quaff 4-6 times the water consumption oftheir Palestinian and Arab neighbors.
"The Economist" claims that:
"The argument over Syria's water rights to the Sea of Galilee isnow the only real stumbling-block to a peace treaty betweenSyria and Israel. Negotiations broke down last January, afterthe two sides appeared to agree on everything save the future ofa sliver of territory on the north-east coast of the sea. Israelhad insisted on keeping control of that, since the Sea ofGalilee supplies more than 40% of its drinking water."
Only two decades ago, the Aral Sea featured in encyclopedias asthe world's fourth largest inland brine. In a typicalhare-brained subterfuge, the communists diverted its two sources- the Amu Darya and Syr Darya - to grow cotton in the desert.The "sea" is now a series of disconnected, toxic, patchesoverlaid on a vast wasteland of salt.
But excess water can be as damaging to multilateralrelationships - and to the economy - as scarcity. Floods broughton by the Zambezi River have devastated the countries on itspath, despite their efforts to harness it. Often, thesecalamities are man-made. Zimbabwe wrought a deluge upon itsregion by opening the gates of the Kariba dam on March 2000. Thecountries of West Africa, from Ghana to Mali are "one riverstates". Their fortunes rise and fall with the flow and ebb ofwaterways.
Sometimes watercourses are conduits of destruction and death. Asingle - though massive - chemical spill in Romania on January31, 2000 devastated the entire Tisa River which runs throughYugoslavia and Hungary. Only when the waste reached the Danubedid the West wake up to the danger.
Nor are these phenomena confined to the poor precincts of ourplanet. The people of Catalonia in Spain are thirsty. Theycontemplate diverting water from the river Rhone in France toBarcelona. A two years old government plan to redistribute waterfrom rain-drenched regions to the arid 60 percent of Spain metwith stiff domestic resistance. The Ogallala aquifer in the USA,its largest, has been depleted to near oblivion. The BBCestimates that it lost the equivalent of 18 Colorado rivers by2000.
(continued)
About the author:Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author ofMalignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain -How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for CentralEurope Review, PopMatters, and eBookWeb , and Bellaonline, andas a United Press International (UPI) Senior BusinessCorrespondent. He is the the editor of mental health and CentralEast Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.
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