Friday, July 01, 2011

Blue Gold - the water wars

Of all the water on earth, 97 per cent is salt water and the remaining three per cent is fresh, with less than one per cent of the planet's drinkable water readily accessible for direct human uses. United Nations studies project that 30 nations will be water scarce in 2025, up from 20 in 1990. Eighteen of them are in the Middle East and North Africa, including Egypt, Israel, Somalia, Libya and Yemen. 1.2 billion people living in areas of physical water scarcity, although the majority of cases are nowhere near as dire. By 2030, 47 per cent of the world’s population will be living in areas of high water stress, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Environmental Outlook to 2030 report.

"Water scarcity is an issue exacerbated by demographic pressures, climate change and pollution," said Ignacio Saiz, director of Centre for Economic and Social Rights, a social justice group. "The world's water supplies should guarantee every member of the population to cover their personal and domestic needs. Fundamentally, these are issues of poverty and inequality, man-made problems," he told Al Jazeera.

Adel Darwish, a journalist and co-author of Water Wars: Coming Conflicts in the Middle East, says modern history has already seen at least two water wars.
"I have former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon speaking on record saying the reason for going to war against Arab armies in 1967 was for water [40% of Israel's water depends on territory occupied in 1967 and still not handed back]..." Darwish explained "...My experience in the first gulf war [when Iraq invaded Kuwait] is that natural resources are always at the heart of tribal conflicts," he added.

"Unequal power relations within states and conflicts between ethnic groups and social classes will be the greatest source of social tensions rising from deprivation," said Ignacio Saiz. "Water too often is treated as a commodity, as an instrument with which one population group can suppress another...People have the right to expect access to a basic life resource like water by virtue of being human, regardless of the social situation they are born into"

"The fight over water privatisation in Cochobamba, Bolivia did turn into a bit of a water war and the army was called in," said Maude Barlow, a former senior adviser to the UN on water issues. "In Botswana, the government smashed bore holes as part of a terrible move to remove indigenous bushmen from the Kalahari desert. Mexico City has been forcibly taking water from the countryside, confiscating water sources from other areas and building fotresses around it, like it's a gold mine. In India, Coke will get contracts and then build fortresses around the water sources taking drinking and irrigation water away from local people." Strife over water, like conflicts more generally, will increasingly happen within states, rather than between them, Barlow says, with large scale agribusiness, mining and energy production taking control over resources at the expense of other users.

Professor Patricia Wouters at the IHP-HELP Centre for water law, policy and science at University of Dundee, said the world could face a future of “water wars” Even in the U.K., the armed forces are being prepared for potential conflicts over water. Professor Wouters said that military plans are being prepared on a 30-year horizon. The Canadian military too are preparing for conflict and an analysis by the Department of National Defence warned energy and water shortages combined with climate change could provoke wars within the next 15 years. The analysis warns that, even under conservative estimates, up to 60 countries could fall into a category of water scarcity or stress by 2050, making the natural resource "a key source of power" or a "basis for future conflict."

In an age when we have the scientific and technological know how to enable us to solve almost all our problems, it is indeed an indictment on capitalism that so many humans, living on a planet, seven eighths of which is covered in water, have so little access to it. With the ever-present drive to cut costs and make profits, it is little wonder that better irrigation and improved channels are as rare as desalination plants and reservoirs?

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