The Emerging Water Wars - Part I
Growing up in Israel in the 1960's, we were always urged to
conserve precious water. Rainfall was rare and meager, the sun
scorching, our only sweet water lake under constant threat by
the Syrians. Israelis were being shot at hauling water cisterns
or irrigating their parched fields. Water was a matter of life
and death - literally.
Drought often conspires with man-made disasters. Macedonia
experienced its second worst dry spell during the civil strife
of last year. Benighted Afghanistan is having one now - replete
with locusts. Rapid, unsustainable urbanization,
desertification, exploding populations, and economic growth,
especially of water-intensive industries, such as microprocessor
fabs - all contribute to the worst water crisis the world has
ever known.
Governments reacted late, hesitantly, and haltingly. Water
conservation, desalination, water rights exchanges, water pacts,
private-public partnerships, and privatization of utilities
(e.g., in Argentina and the UK) - may have been implemented too
little, too late.
Rising incomes lead to the exertion of political pressure on the
authorities by civic movements and NGO's to improve water
quality and availability. But can the authorities help?
According to the World Bank, close to $600 billion will be
needed by 2010 just to augment existing reserves and to improve
water grade levels.
The UNDP believes that half the population in Africa will be
subject to wrenching water shortages in 25 years. The
environmental 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 and
agriculture consumes almost 70 percent of the world's water -
though only less than 30 percent in OECD countries. It takes
more than the entire throughput of the Nile to grow the grain
imported annually by Middle Eastern and North African countries
alone. Some precipitation-poor countries even grow cotton and
rice, both insatiable crops. By 2020, says the World Water
Council, we will be short 17 percent of the water that would be
needed to feed the population.
The USA withdraws one fifth of its total resources annually -
proportionately, one half of Belgium's drawdown. But according
to the OECD, Americans are the most profligate consumers of
fresh water, more than double the OECD's average in the 1990's.
Britain and Denmark have actually reduced their utilization by
20 percent between 1980 and 1996 - probably due to sharp and
ominous drops in their water tables.
Stratfor, a strategic forecasting firm, reported on May 14 that
Mexico and the USA are in the throes of a conflict over Mexico's
"failure to live up to its water supply commitments under a 1944
treaty", 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 million
acre-feet over the last 8 years - the result of a decade long
drought. Each acre-foot is c. 1.2 million liters. Mexico's
reservoirs are less than 25 percent full. Some of the water,
though, has been used to transform its borderland into a major
producer of fresh vegetables for the American market - at the
expense of Texas farmers.
Faced with the worst drought in more than a century in some
states, the Bush administration has announced on May 3 that it
is considering sanctions, including, perhaps the suspension of
water supplies from the Colorado to Mexico. Texas lawmakers
demanded to re-open NAFTA and amend it punitively.
Mexico is a typical case. Only 9 percent of its streams and
rivers are fit for drinking. Its underground water is almost
equally polluted. Its infrastructure is crumbling, leading to
severe seepage of more than two fifths of the water. Half of the
rest evaporates in open canals.
Moreover, water is under-priced, thus encouraging wasteful
consumption, mainly by farmers. Stratfor cites an estimate
published in the May 5 issue Fort Worth Star-Telegram - more
than $60 billion will be needed over the next decade to
refurbish Mexico's urban and rural networks.
William K. Reilly, former administrator of the EPA, writing in
the "ITT Industries Guidebook to Global Water Issues", mentions
the human cost of water scarcity: a million dead children a
year, a billion people without access to treated water, almost
double this number without sanitation.
More than 11,000 people died in a cholera epidemic induced by
polluted water in Latin America in the 1990's. Every year,
according to the World Bank, the amount of water polluted equals
the quantity of water consumed. In many parts of the world,
notably in Africa, people walk for hours to obtain their
contaminated daily water rations.
Water shortage hobbles industrial production in places as
diverse as Sicily and Malaysia. The lower estuaries of the
Yellow River - China's most important - are now dry two thirds
of the year. The water table beneath China's fertile northern
plane is falling by 1.5 meters a year.
The drought in Sri Lanka is so severe and so prolonged that the
International Red Cross had to intervene and launch an appeal
for emergency funds. The Mekong River, which flows from China to
Vietnam, is being obstructed by 7 Chinese dams under
construction. 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. 70
percent of its contribution to the Mekong by constructing 23
dams. Thailand follows with 20 percent of its contribution and a
mere 4 dams. Vietnam is likely to pay the price of this "dam
war". Thailand is sufficiently rich to simply buy the water it
needs from its truculent neighbors.
Australia is in no better shape. The diversion of Snowy River
inland led to massive salinization of the lands it irrigates -
Australia's bread basket. Many of the tributaries are now unfit
for 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 Bangladesh
regarding this dwindling lifeline, recent progress in
negotiations notwithstanding. This is reminiscent of a low
intensity conflict that has been brewing along the banks of the
Nile between an assertive Egypt and the encroaching Sudan and
Ethiopia since the Nile Basin Initiative has been signed in 1993.
A July 2000 conference of the riparian states, backed by the
likes of the World Bank and the United Nations, eased the
tension somewhat by promulgating a workable plan to redistribute
the African river's throughput. The emphasis in the February
2001 meeting of the International Consortium Cooperation on the
Nile, though, was on hydro-power over the contentious minefield
of water usage rights.
Turkey is constructing more than two dozen dams on the Tigris
and Euphrates within the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP).
Once completed, Turkey will have the option to deprive both
Syria and Iraq of their main sources of water, though it vowed
not to do so. In a cynical twist, it offers to sell them water
from its Manavgat river. Iraq's own rivers have shriveled by
half. Still, this is the less virulent and violent of the water
conflicts in the Middle East.
Israel controls the Kinneret Sea of Galilee. It is the source of
one third of its water consumption. The rest it pumps from
rivers in the region, to the vocal dismay of Syria, Lebanon, and
Jordan. Despite decades of indoctrination, Israelis are
water-guzzlers. They quaff 4-6 times the water consumption of
their Palestinian and Arab neighbors.
"The Economist" claims that:
"The argument over Syria's water rights to the Sea of Galilee is
now the only real stumbling-block to a peace treaty between
Syria and Israel. Negotiations broke down last January, after
the two sides appeared to agree on everything save the future of
a sliver of territory on the north-east coast of the sea. Israel
had insisted on keeping control of that, since the Sea of
Galilee supplies more than 40% of its drinking water."
Only two decades ago, the Aral Sea featured in encyclopedias as
the world's fourth largest inland brine. In a typical
hare-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, patches
overlaid on a vast wasteland of salt.
But excess water can be as damaging to multilateral
relationships - and to the economy - as scarcity. Floods brought
on by the Zambezi River have devastated the countries on its
path, despite their efforts to harness it. Often, these
calamities are man-made. Zimbabwe wrought a deluge upon its
region by opening the gates of the Kariba dam on March 2000. The
countries of West Africa, from Ghana to Mali are "one river
states". Their fortunes rise and fall with the flow and ebb of
waterways.
Sometimes watercourses are conduits of destruction and death. A
single - though massive - chemical spill in Romania on January
31, 2000 devastated the entire Tisa River which runs through
Yugoslavia and Hungary. Only when the waste reached the Danube
did the West wake up to the danger.
Nor are these phenomena confined to the poor precincts of our
planet. The people of Catalonia in Spain are thirsty. They
contemplate diverting water from the river Rhone in France to
Barcelona. A two years old government plan to redistribute water
from rain-drenched regions to the arid 60 percent of Spain met
with stiff domestic resistance. The Ogallala aquifer in the USA,
its largest, has been depleted to near oblivion. The BBC
estimates that it lost the equivalent of 18 Colorado rivers by
2000.
(continued)