Water

Looming Water Crisis IS THE WORLD RUNNING OUT OF WATER?

I n the past decade drought has marched across much of the globe, hitting China, the Mediterranean, south-

east Australia and the U.S. Sun Belt. The amount of water used by humans has tripled since 1950, and irri-

gated cropland has doubled. About one-fifth of the world’s population lacks sufficient water, a figure that

could reach 40 percent by 2025 by some estimates, in part because of growing world economies. In the

poorest societies more than a billion people lack access to clean water, and dirty water kills 5,000 children — enough

to fill 12 jumbo jets — every day. By century’s end drought is expected to spread across half the Earth’s land surface

due to climate change, causing hunger

and higher food prices. The United Nations

says it would cost an extra $10 billion or

more annually to provide clean water

and sanitation for all. Some recommend

privatizing water supplies, while others

suggest that charging more for water to

encourage conservation would help to

avoid future crises.

Children play in the dried up bed of the Jialing River near the booming city of Chongqing in central China.

The countr y’s worst drought in a half-centur y prompted Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to warn that the crisis

threatens “the sur vival of the Chinese nation.”

FEBRUARY 2008 VOLUME 2, NUMBER 2 PAGES 27-56 WWW.GLOBALRESEARCHER.COM

PUBLISHED BY CQ PRESS, A DIVISION OF CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY INC. WWW.CQPRESS.COM

28 CQ Global Researcher

THE ISSUES

29 • Are we running out ofwater? • Should water be priva- tized? • Will water scarcity lead to conflicts?

BACKGROUND

38 Taming WaterThe 20th century was the heyday of dam building.

42 Regulating WaterAncient codes established water-sharing rules.

43 Misusing WaterDirty water kills nearly 2 million children a year.

45 Ocean WatersDesalination is growing but expensive.

CURRENT SITUATION

45 Melting SnowsShrinking snowpack indi- cates climate change may already affect scarcity.

48 Wasted WaterA water-conservation ethic is emerging.

OUTLOOK

48 Thirst and HungerAs water demand outstrips supply, both water and food prices will rise.

SIDEBARS AND GRAPHICS

30 Water Scarcity Projected for Many Regions China and the U.S. face big changes.

31 Water Consumption VariesAmericans use the most.

32 Sanitation and Water Access Improves Worldwide But access is still limited.

35 Irrigation Doubled in Developing Nations But rate of increase is slowing.

37 Mountain Snowpack Is Shrinking Melting threatens crucial, replenishing water flows.

38 China Leads in Dam Building It has three times as many dams as the U.S.

39 ChronologyKey events since 1848.

40 Empowering Women May Quench Thirst ‘Should girls be kept home from school to collect water?’

44 Water Schemes Range from Monumental to Zany Many are controversial.

47 At IssueShould water be privatized?

56 Voices From AbroadHeadlines and editorials from around the world.

FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

53 For More InformationOrganizations to contact.

54 BibliographySelected sources used.

55 The Next StepAdditional articles.

55 Citing CQ Global ResearcherSample bibliography formats.

LOOMING WATER CRISIS

Cover : AP Photo/Color China Photo

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February 2008 Volume 2, Number 2

February 2008 29Available online: www.globalresearcher.com

Looming Water Crisis

THE ISSUES A

s 2007 came to a close, the steady drumbeat of headlines about

China’s worst drought in a half-century affirmed Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s earlier warning that the crisis threat- ens “the survival of the Chi- nese nation.” 1

The alarming develop- ments included:

• The drying up of 133 reservoirs in burgeoning Guangdong Province, leaving a quarter of a million people facing water shortages. 2

• The lowest levels since 1866 on portions of the Yangtze River, restricting barge and ship traffic and reducing hydroelectric output on China’s largest river, even as pollution from 9,000 industrial plants along its course jeopardizes drinking water supplies. 3

• Near-record low levels in vast Lake Poyang, restricting water sup- plies for 100,000 people. 4

“My house used to be by the side of the lake,” villager Yu Wenchang told the Xinhua News Agency. “Now I have to go over a dozen kilometers away to get to the lake water.” 5

Similar woes are being reported across the globe, as one of the worst decades of drought on record afflicts rich and poor nations alike. While scientists hedge their conclusions about whether long- term climate change is causing the dry spell, many warn that Earth’s gradual warming trend unquestionably poses a growing threat to water supplies and food production in arid regions. Already, population growth and economic ex- pansion are straining water supplies in

many places, particularly in the poor- est nations. But despite an unending series of international water conferences — attended by thousands of experts — no consensus has emerged on how to make adequate clean water available to all people in affordable, environ- mentally sustainable ways. 6

A fifth of the world’s population — 1.2 billion people — live in areas ex- periencing “physical water scarcity,” or insufficient supplies for everyone’s de- mands, according to a 2006 study by the International Water Management Institute that draws on the work of 700 scientists and experts. Another 1 billion face “economic scarcity,” in which “human capacity or financial re- sources” cannot provide adequate water, the report found. 7

While drought and ex- panding populations visibly affect the world’s lakes and rivers, a less-visible problem also threatens water supplies. Accelerated pumping of groundwater for irrigation is d e p l e t i n g u n d e rg r o u n d aquifers faster than they can be refreshed in densely pop- ulated areas of North China, India and Mexico. And land and water resources there and beyond are being degraded through erosion, pollution, salination, nutrient depletion and seawater intrusion, ac- cording to the institute.

A United Nations task force on water predicted that by 2025, 3 billion people will face “water stress” conditions, lacking enough water to meet all human and environmen- tal needs. 8 By that time, there will be 63 major river basins with populations of at least 10 million, of which 47 are either already water-stressed, will become stressed or will experience a significant de-

terioration in water supply, according to a separate study by the World Re- sources Institute incorporating the U.N. data. 9 (See map, p. 30.) *

As water depletion accelerates, drought is undermining nature’s ca- pacity to replenish this essential re- source, punishing the planet’s mid- section — from eastern Australia and northern China through the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa to the U.S. Sun Belt, the Great Plains and northern Mexico.

BY PETER BEHR

A FP

/G et

ty Im

ag es

/S im

o n

M ai

na

Kenyan children play in raw sewage in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum. Each year 1.8 million children — 5,000 a day —

die from waterborne illnesses due to a lack of access to sanitation and clean water.

* “Water stress” occurs when less than 1,700 cubic meters (448,000 gallons) per person of new fresh water is available annually from rainfall or aquifers for human use, making populations vulnerable to frequent interrup- tions in water supply.

30 CQ Global Researcher

In the United States, chronic alarms over depleted water resources in the Southwestern states have spread to the Southeast. The water level in giant Lake Sidney Lanier outside Atlanta has dropped about a dozen feet in this decade, caus- ing an intense struggle among Georgia and neighboring Alabama and Florida over rights to the lake’s diminished flows. 10

And drought conditions worldwide are likely to worsen as the effects of

climate change are felt, many scien- tists warn. 11 Climate change is ex- pected to expand and intensify drought in traditionally dry regions and disrupt water flows from the world’s moun- tain snowcaps and glaciers.

Finally, a new threat to global water supplies has emerged: terrorism. “The chance that terrorists will strike at water systems is real,” said Peter H. Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland, Calif. 12 Mod-

ern public water systems are designed to protect users from biological agents and toxins, but deliberate contamina- tion by terrorists could kill or sicken thousands, he said. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks most major U.S. cities have sent the federal govern- ment confidential reports on the vul- nerability of local water supplies, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Water Sentinel Initiative is de- signing a water-contamination warn- ing system. 13

LOOMING WATER CRISIS

Serious Shortages Projected for Many Regions Water shortages are expected to afflict much of the Earth by 2025, as growing populations use vastly more water for daily life and farming. Areas likely to be hardest hit include China, Western Europe, the United States, Mexico and a wide swath of the globe’s midsection from India to North Africa. In the most severe cases, humans are expected to use up to 40 percent of the available water, compared with the current average withdrawal, or use, rate, of 10 percent.

* Based on data from 1996-2000

Source: World Meteorological Organisation, Global Environment Outlook, U.N. Environment Programme, Earthscan, www.unep.org/dewa/assessments/ecosystems/water/vitalwater/21.htm#21b

Projected Water-Use Rates, 2025 *

Water Withdrawal as Percentage of Total Available

More than 40%

20% to 40%

10% to 20%

Less than 10%

February 2008 31Available online: www.globalresearcher.com

Perhaps the grimmest long-range prediction on water availability was issued by the Met Office Hadley Cen- tre for Climate Prediction and Research in London. Using supercomputer mod- eling, the center projected that if cur- rent trends continue, by this centu- ry’s end drought will have spread across half the Earth’s land surface due to climate change, threatening millions of lives. Moreover, “extreme drought” — which makes traditional agriculture virtually impossible — will affect about a third of the planet, ac- cording to the group’s November 2006 report.

“Even though (globally) total rain- fall will increase as the climate warms, the proportion of land in drought is projected to rise throughout the 21st century,” the report said. 14

“There’s almost no aspect of life in the developing countries that these predictions don’t undermine — the ability to grow food, the ability to have a safe sanitation system, the availabil- ity of water,” said Andrew Simms, pol- icy director of the liberal London-based New Economics Foundation. 15 The consequences will be most dire for the planet’s poorest inhabitants, he added. “For hundreds of millions of people for whom getting through the day is already a struggle, this is going to push them over the precipice.”

Access to safe, fresh water separates the well-off — who can treat water as if it were air — from the world’s poor- est, who hoard it like gold. In the Unit- ed States, the average consumer uses nearly 160 gallons of water per day, summoned by the twist of a faucet. In much of Africa, women often trudge for hours to and from wells, carrying the two to five gallons per person used by the typical person in sub-Saharan Africa. (See graph, above.) 16

But the lack of clean water is not only inconvenient. It can also be dead- ly. Each year 1.8 million children — 5,000 per day — die from waterborne illnesses such as diarrhea, according

to the United Nations. “That’s equiv- alent to 12 full jumbo jets crashing every day,” said U.N. water expert Brian Appleton. “If 12 full jumbo jets were crashing every day, the world would want to do something about it — they would want to find out why it was happening.” 17

Policymakers are trying various ways to solve the global water challenge, including contracting with private firms to operate urban water and sanitary systems, adopting new conservation technologies, enacting multination pacts to manage regional watersheds and increasing funds for water projects in the world’s poorest regions. Water ex-

perts advocate “environmental flow” policies — the release of enough water from dams to sustain the envi- ronment of rivers, wetlands and un- derground aquifers. 18

And their efforts seem to be paying off — at least in some areas. Between 1990 and 2002, more than 1 billion peo- ple in the developing world gained ac- cess to fresh water and basic sanitation. But because of population growth, the total number of people still lacking safe water remained more than a billion, and there was no change in the number lacking basic sanitation. 19

In 2003, the U.N. General Assembly designated the period from 2005 to 2015 as the International Decade for Action on “Water for Life.” And the U.N.’s new Millennium Development Goals include a campaign to cut in half by 2015 the proportion of people with- out sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation — at a cost of more than $10 billion per year. 20

Currently, governments and international agencies like the U.N. and World Bank provide only $4 billion a year in aid for water and sanitation projects. 21

“We will see these issues play out silently: dry rivers, dead deltas, de- stocked fisheries, depleted springs and wells,” wrote Margaret Carley-Carlson, chairwoman of the Global Water Part- nership in Stockholm, and M. S. Swami- nathan, president of the Pugwash Con- ferences on Science and World Affairs in Chennai, India. 22 “We will also see famine; increased and sometimes vio- lent competition for water, especially within states; more migration; and en- vironmental devastation with fires, dust, and new plagues and blights.”

Averting that future will require fun- damental changes in governmental policies and human practices govern- ing the use, conservation and value of water, experts agree.

As water experts and policymakers discuss how to conserve and protect future water supplies, here are some of the questions they are debating:

World Water Consumption Varies The average American uses nearly 160 gallons of water per day for drinking, cooking, bathing and sanitation — more than any other nationality and more than twice the amount used by many Europeans. People in sub-Saharan Africa use only about a quarter of the 13 gallons the United Nations sets as a minimum basic standard.

* Consumption among European countries ranges from 66-92 gallons

Source: World Water Council

Average Household Water Use

(Per capita per day)

0

50

100

150

200

U.S.Europe*U.N. Recom- mended

Minimum

Sub- Saharan Africa

(gallons)

2.6-5.2 13.2

66-92

158.5

32 CQ Global Researcher

Are we running out of water? Amid the growing alarm about water

shortages, water expert Frank Rijsber- man offers a contrarian perspective. “The world is far from running out of water,” he says. “There is land and human resources and water enough to grow food and provide drinking water for everyone.” 23

The issue is how efficiently water is used, says Rijsberman, former director

of the International Water Management Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Every year, about 110,000 cubic kilometers * of rain falls on Earth’s surface, of which humans withdraw just over 3 percent — about 3,700 cubic kilometers — from rivers and groundwater to use in cities, industries and farming. About 40,000

cubic kilometers flows into rivers and is absorbed into groundwater, and the rest evaporates.

Much of the water used by hu- mans is returned to watersheds as wastewater, farm runoff or discharges from energy and industrial plants, with only a small fraction used for drinking and cooking. 24 Irrigation claims 70 percent of total water with- drawals, 22 percent is used by in- dustry and the rest goes for homes, personal and municipal uses. 25

Water isn’t running out everywhere, said Canadian journalist Marq de Villiers, author of Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource. “It’s only running out in places where it’s needed most. It’s an allocation, supply and manage- ment problem.” 26

It’s also a demand problem: Over the past half-century, millions of people have migrated from colder, wetter, northern climates to warmer, drier, southern lo- cales such as the American Southwest or southern France, putting new pres- sure on those expanding “Sun Belt” com- munities to build irrigation systems, tap into groundwater supplies or rechannel large amounts of river water.

Experts agree that the world should not be facing an overall water-scarcity crisis. But water supplies in much of Africa, parts of China, southern Europe, northern Mexico and the American Southwest and high plains aren’t meet- ing demand, and climate change may be accelerating the problem, the ex- perts say. 27 The issues add up to what the World Commission on Water calls the “gloomy arithmetic of water.” 28

In addition, man has transformed most of the world’s great rivers. For ex- ample, the Danube — Central Europe’s “lifeline” — has been dredged, deep- ened, straightened, channelized and ob- structed by dams and fishing weirs. It is now “a manufactured waterway,” says de Villiers, with more than a third of its volume withdrawn for human use, compared to an average of about 10 percent for other rivers. 29

LOOMING WATER CRISIS

Poorest Lag Far Behind in Access Although progress has been made since 1990, only 37 percent of the residents in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia had access to sanitation services in 2004. Sub-Saharan Africa lags behind the rest of the world in access to reliable sources of clean water. Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of those living in the industrialized countries, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and the former Soviet republics had access to water in 2004.

* Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, made up of the worlds’ industrialized countries

Source: “Human Development Report 2006,” UNDP

Percentage of Population with Access to: (1990-2004)

Sanitation Water

0% 20 40 60 80 100

OECD*

Central, Eastern Europe; former Soviet republics

Average, least- developed countries

Sub-Saharan Africa

South Asia

Latin America, Caribbean

East Asia and the Pacific

Arab states

0% 20 40 60 80 100

OECD*

Central, Eastern Europe; former Soviet republics

Average, least- developed countries

Sub-Saharan Africa

South Asia

Latin America, Caribbean

East Asia and the Pacific

Arab states

1990

2004

61% 71%

30% 50%

67% 78%

18% 37%

32% 37%

22% 37%

n/a n/a

94% 96%

84% 86%

72% 79%

83% 91%

72% 85%

48% 56%

51% 59%

93% 94%

97% 99%

* 1 cubic kilometer would cover an area of about 810,000 acres with one foot of water.

February 2008 33Available online: www.globalresearcher.com

Pollution is also reducing the world’s supply of potable water. In Asia, many rivers “are dead or dying,” according to Rijsberman. The Musi River near India’s Hyderabad technology center has become “a dwindling black wastewater stream,” he writes. “[Y]et the cows that produce the curd and the dairy products for Hy- derabad are bathing in that black and stinking water.” 30 In China, 265 billion gallons of raw sewage is dumped into the Yangtze River every year. 31

The depletion and despoiling of the world’s reservoirs, rivers and water- sheds also contribute to the problem. During the 20th century, more than half the wetlands in parts of Australia, Eu- rope, New Zealand and North Ameri- ca were destroyed by population growth and development. The loss of wetlands increases water runoff, which exacer- bates flooding, reduces the replenish- ment of aquifers and leaves rivers and lakes more vulnerable to pollution. 32

Aquifers — the immense storehous- es of water found beneath the Earth’s surface — are the largest and fastest- growing source of irrigation water. De- pleting those underground rivers will have deleterious effects on the 40 percent of the planet’s agricultural output that relies on irrigation from groundwater. 33 Ex- perts say some of that water — which dates back to past ice ages — would take eons to refresh but is being con- sumed in less than a century.

“Large areas of China, South Asia and the Middle East are now main- taining irrigation through unsustain- able mining of groundwater or over- extraction from rivers,” said the U.N. “Human Development Report 2006.” 34

The problem is widespread in Mexico, India and Russia, as well, although precise data are not available for many countries. 35

In his seminal 1986 book Cadillac Desert, the late Marc Reisner warned about the long-term effects of water policies in the Western United States, including the depletion of the giant Ogallala Aquifer, which runs south-

ward from South Dakota to Texas. It has two distinctions, he wrote, “one of being the largest discrete aquifer in the world, the other of being the fastest- disappearing aquifer in the world.” 36

In the 1930s a farmer on the Great Plains could raise a few gallons per minute from the Ogallala, using a windmill-driven pump. After the New Deal brought electricity to the region and oil and gas discoveries provided plenty of cheap fuel, electric pumps raised 800 gallons per minute.

“All of a sudden, irrigation became very energy- and labor-efficient. You turn on the switch and let it run,” says Robert M. Hirsch, associate director for water at the U.S. Geological Survey.

“There was an explosion of irrigated agriculture, particularly on the high plains, and in California.”

In 1937, West Texas had 1,116 irri- gation wells. Thirty years later it had 27,983. By 1977, Texas was withdraw- ing 11 billion gallons of groundwater a day to grow corn, cotton and other crops in what once had been part of the Great American Desert, Reisner wrote. 37

Now, experts say the Ogallala — a resource that could have lasted hundreds of years — will be virtually depleted within the lifetimes of today’s farmers.

Yet during the optimism and op- portunism that characterized develop- ment of the modern American West,

Dead plants in a parched field attest to the ravages of the worldwide drought in Liujiang, a county of southwest China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, in November 2006.

Nearly all of the region’s 84 counties were affected by the drought, which was caused by unseasonably warm temperatures, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

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Continued on p. 35

34 CQ Global Researcher

LOOMING WATER CRISIS

S hould all humans have guaranteed access to clean water, or is water an increasingly scarce commodity that should be priced according to its value?

The question stands at the center of a global debate over threats to the world’s water resources, as competition for water increases among industry, farming and households. It is also critical in efforts to protect the long-term environmental via- bility of rivers, lakes and aquifers.

The debate goes back at least to 1992, when an international commission on water and the environment meeting in Ireland issued the “Dublin Principles,” which were later adopted by a U.N. panel. The commission concluded: “Water has an economic value . . . and should be recognized as an economic good.” Only by recognizing that economic value can water “be prop- erly conserved and allocated to its most important uses.” 1

But the principle also declared it a “basic right of all human beings to have access to clean water and sanitation at an af- fordable price.” Poor households cannot compete with indus- try for scarce water supplies. Nor could most farmers, who typ- ically receive subsidized prices for irrigation water.

The U.N. Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights declared in 2002 that all people are entitled to an essential minimum amount of clean water. “Water is fundamental for life and health,” it said. “The human right to water is indispens- able for leading a healthy life in human dignity.” 2

Canadian activist Maude Barlow says, “You can’t really charge for a human right; you can’t trade it or deny it to someone because they don’t have money.” Barlow is co-author of Blue Gold: The Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World’s Water. 3

The other side in the debate argues that until water is priced and valued as a scarce resource it will be wasted and billions of dollars required annually to extend water service to the poor and fix leaking water systems will not be forthcoming. Two years be- fore the U.N. declared clean water a human right, the World Water Council — which reflects the views of international lenders and the water-supply industry — called for “full pricing” of water to reflect its “economic, social, environmental and cultural values.” 4

Farmers in dry regions throughout the world get water at preferential rates — or at no charge at all — as a matter of government policy. But if farmers were required to pay the full price for water, they could not compete with industry, which would be willing and able to pay market price.

In industrial countries, 60 percent of the water withdrawn from freshwater sources is used by industry, mainly to gener- ate electricity. The developing world is moving rapidly in the same direction. China’s industrial water use, for example, is pro- jected to grow fivefold by 2030. 5

“As urban centers and industry increase their demand for water, agriculture is losing out,” said the U.N. “Human Devel- opment Report 2006.” 6

And the world’s poor cannot compete with either farmers or business for water at market prices, said the report. About a third of those without access to clean water live on less than $1 a day. Twice that many live on less than $2 a day. “These figures imply that 660 million people lacking access to [safe] water have, at best, a limited capacity to pay more than a small amount for a connection to water service,” the report said. “People might lack water because they are poor, or they might be poor because they lack water.” The end result is the same: a limited ability to pay for water. 7

American water expert Peter H. Gleick calls for a truce in the water rights dispute in favor of problem-solving. Workshops on privatization standards and principles for implementing a human right to water “would be far more likely to produce progress,” he writes. 8

1 “Dublin Statements and Principles,” Global Water Partnership; www.gw- pforum.org/servlet/PSP?iNodeID=1345. 2 Meena Palaniappan, et al., “Environmental Justice and Water,” The World’s Water 2006-2007, p. 117. 3 Jeff Fleischer, “Interview with Maude Barlow,” Mother Jones, Jan. 14, 2005, www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/01/maude_barlow.html. 4 “Ministerial Declaration of The Hague,” World Water Forum, March 22, 2000. 5 Palaniappan, op. cit., p. 125. 6 See “Summary, Human Development Report 2006: Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis,” United Nations Development Pro- gramme, p. 17, http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/hdr2006_english_summary.pdf. 7 Ibid., pp. 49-52. 8 Peter Gleick, “Time to Rethink Large International Water Meetings,” The World’s Water 2006-2007, p. 182.

Is Access to Clean Water a Human Right? The question is at the heart of a global debate.

A man protesting the privatization of water in Cochabamba, Bolivia, waves a sign saying “what is ours is ours and it cannot be taken away.”

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February 2008 35Available online: www.globalresearcher.com

worries about future water supplies evap- orated. “What are you going to do with all that water?” the late Felix Sparks, for- mer head of the Colorado Water Con- servation Board, asked in the mid-1980s. “When we use it up, we’ll just have to get water from somewhere else.” But today, “somewhere else” is not an answer, say authors Robin Clarke, editor of climate publications for the United Nations and World Meteorolo- gal Organization, and environmental author Jannet King. The co-authors of The Water Atlas insist water must be considered a finite resource. 38

Should water be privatized? In 2000, street fighting broke out be-

tween government forces and political activists, rural cocoa farmers and resi- dents of shantytowns on the hilly out- skirts of Cochabamba — Bolivia’s third- largest city. The dispute was over privatization of the city’s water supplies.

The year before, Cochabamba had turned its water and sanitation system over to Aguas del Tunari, a coalition of multinational and Bolivian water and engineering corporations whose biggest stakeholder was Bechtel Corp., based in San Francisco. 39 This was the high- water mark of a global, pro-market movement toward deregulation and pri- vatization of state-owned monopolies in water, electricity and other services. 40 The World Bank and other interna- tional lenders had been supporting pri- vatization strategies in hopes that in- vestments and better management by private industry would help bring water and sanitation to more than a billion poor people whose governments couldn’t or wouldn’t do the job.

But Cochabamba’s privatization in- cluded a costly dam and pipeline to import more water, which required sharp rate increases starting at 35 per- cent. Some customers’ water bills dou- bled. Farmers outside the city, who had enjoyed free water, suddenly had to pay. The city erupted in protest,

the water company’s officials fled and their contract was rescinded. 41 The government reclaimed the water op- erations, and Cochabamba became a rallying cry against privatization and globalization for the political left.

Elsewhere, however, corporate in- volvement in water and sanitation sys- tem operations has not ceased. Veo- lia Water, a subsidiary of the French firm Veolia Environment SA — the world’s largest water-services firm — signed a $3.8 billion, 30-year, contract in 2007 to supply drinking water to 3 million residents of the Chinese river port city of Tianjin. Since 1997, Veolia has signed more than 20 water and sanitation contracts in China, and supplies more than 110 million peo- ple in 57 countries worldwide. 42

These projects, and smaller-scale ver- sions in poorer nations, suggest that while the inflamed debate over water privatization continues, threats of water scarcity and climate change may help

accelerate the search for private-sector support.

The percentage of the world’s pop- ulation served at some level by pri- vate firms has grown from 5 percent in 1999 to 11 percent — or 707 mil- lion people — in 2007, according to Pinsent Masons Water Yearbook, a widely consulted summary of private- sector water projects. 43

Opponents of privatization argue that safe drinking water and adequate san- itation are essential human rights, oblig- ating governments to provide them at affordable rates or free if necessary. “If it’s a human need, it can be delivered by the private sector on a for-profit basis. If it’s a human right, that’s dif- ferent,” says Canadian anti-globalization activist Maude Barlow, co-author of Blue Gold: The Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World’s Water. “You can’t really charge for a human right; you can’t trade it or deny it to someone because they don’t have money.” 44

Continued from p. 33

Irrigation Doubled in Developing Nations The amount of irrigated land more than doubled in developing countries in the past four decades, increasing faster than in the developed world. But the rate of increase for both has slowed in recent years because of heavy draws on groundwater aquifers and competition from industry for water.

Source: Peter H. Gleick, et al., "The World's Water: 2006-2007," Pacific Institute, 2006

Amount of Irrigated Land

Developed Countries Developing Countries

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

2003200019951990198519801975197019651961

(millions of acres)

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Bringing in private firms to run water and sewer operations does not make the services more efficient or affordable, opponents also argue, but forces the poor to pay for corporate profits, shareholder dividends and high executive salaries. “The efficiencies don’t happen,” asserts Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food and Water Watch, a Washington anti- globalization group. “The companies simply lay off staff members until they don’t have enough people to take care of the infrastructure. And they raise rates. We’ve seen this all over the world.” Last year Hauter’s orga- nization issued a study claiming pri- vatized water operations in California, Illinois, Wisconsin and New York

charged more for water than compa- rable publicly owned systems. 45

Privatization advocates dispute Hauter’s claims, and facts to settle the issue are illusive. A 2005 survey by the AEI-Brookings Center for Regulatory Studies found “no systematic empirical evidence comparing public and private water systems in the United States.” 46

A study by the Inter-American De- velopment Bank of water rates in Colombia said prices charged by pri- vatized systems were not significantly different from those charged by pub- lic systems. 47 And privatization ap-

pears to have improved water quali- ty in urban areas but not in rural com- munities, said the study. After privati- zation began, water bills for the poor rose about 10 percent but declined for the wealthy, reflecting a scaling back in government subsidies to poorer con- sumers. Similar shifts occurred in both privatized and non-privatized cities. 48

In central cities, water-rate subsi- dies tend to favor the wealthy and middle classes, who are usually con- nected to municipal water systems, while the poor often are not, says American journalist Diane Raines Ward, author of Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst. And by keeping water rates artificially low, utilities typically collect only about a

third of their actual costs, so they don’t raise enough money to expand pipelines to unserved poor neighbor- hoods, she says. 49

The rural poor or those living in urban slums often must haul water home from public wells or buy it from independent merchants — delivered by truck or burro — at much higher prices. In Cairo, Egypt, for instance, the poor pay 40 times the real cost of delivery; in Karachi, Pakistan, the figure is 83 times; and in parts of Haiti, 100 times, Ward says.

In the years since Cochabamba gal- vanized the left against privatizing water,

privatization has declined in Latin Amer- ica and sub-Saharan Africa but in- creased in Europe and Asia, accord- ing to the Water Yearbook. 50 The average contract size also has dimin- ished since the 1990s, it said, due to a trend away from mega-contracts with multinational water companies in favor of “local and possibly less con- tentious contracts.” 51

A U.N.-sponsored analysis cites Chile and parts of Colombia among the suc- cessful examples of collaborative water and sanitation services. In Carta- gena, Colombia’s fifth-largest city, the local government retains control of the pipes and facilities and raises invest- ment capital, but a private firm runs the service. Today, nearly all the city’s residents have water in their homes, up from only one-quarter in 1995. 52

Chile’s water program offers subsidies to the poorest households, guarantee- ing an essential minimum of supply of up to 4,000 gallons per month. De- liveries are monitored to limit cheat- ing, and every household must have a water meter to verify usage. 53

Experts say the political problems of water privatization cannot be man- aged without effective government reg- ulation and consumer involvement at all levels. Both elements were miss- ing in Cochabamba but are present in Chile, the U.N. report says. 54

Will water scarcity lead to con- flicts?

In 1995 Ismail Serageldin, a World Bank vice president, predicted that “the wars of the next century will be over water.” 55

The reality has been different thus far. “Water resources are rarely the sole source of conflict, and indeed, water is frequently a source of cooperation,” writes Gleick, of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, in the new edition of The World’s Water 2006-2007. 56 The sur- vey of reported conflicts over water in the past 50 years, compiled by Oregon

LOOMING WATER CRISIS

The outlook is bleak for rancher Andrew Higham’s parched land in Gunnedah, in northwestern New South Wales, Australia, in October 2006. Scarce winter rains caused drought across much of the continent last fall and led to severely reduced wheat and barley har vests.

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State University researchers, found 37 cases of violence between nations, all but seven in the Middle East. 57

In 1964, Israel opened its massive National Water Carrier canal to carry water from the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River to its farms and cities. Syria retaliated to maintain its access to the Jordan by starting two canals to divert Jordan flows for its uses. Skirmishes by military units and raids by the newly established al- Fatah forces escalated until Israeli air strikes halted the diversion projects. By then, Israel and the Arab League were on the road to the Six-Day War of 1967. 58

“The attacks by Syria, Egypt, and Jor- dan that eventually followed had many causes, but water remained a priority for both sides,” says author Ward. 59

Still, more than 200 water treaties have been negotiated peacefully over the past half-century. The Partition of India in 1947, for instance, could have led to war between India and newly created Pakistan over control of the mighty Indus River basin. Instead, the two nations were brought together with World Bank support over a per- ilous decade of negotiations, signing the Indus Water Treaty in 1960. Three rivers were given to Pakistan, and three to India, with a stream of in- ternational financial support for dams and canals in both countries. Even when war raged between the two na- tions in later years, they never at- tacked water infrastructure. 60

“Most peoples and even nations are hesitant to deny life’s most basic ne- cessity to others,” Ward wrote. Two modern exceptions occurred during the Bosnian War (1992-1996), when Serbs “lay waiting to shoot men, women and children arriving at riverbanks or taps around Sarajevo carrying buckets or bottles,” and during Saddam Hus- sein’s regime in Iraq, when he diverted the lower waters of the Tigris and Eu- phrates rivers to destroy the homes and livelihood of the Marsh Arabs. 61

Except for such instances, coop- eration over water resources is com- mon today, even if sometimes grudging and incomplete, says Un- dala Alam, a professor and special- ist in water diplomacy at Britain’s Cranfield University. “Turkey was re- leasing water for Syria and Iraq; the Nile countries are preparing projects jointly to develop the river; the Niger countries have a shared vision for the basin’s development, and the Zambezi countries are working with- in the Southern African Develop- ment Community,” she notes. 62

But analysts warn that growing stress on water supplies, coupled with the impact of climate change, will create combustible conditions in the coming years that will undermine collabora- tion over water.

There is plenty of precedence for the concern, notes Gleick, who de- scribes the history of violence over fresh water as “long and distressing.” 63 The latest volume of The World’s Water lists 22 pages of historical water conflicts —

beginning in about 1700 B.C. with the Sumerians’ efforts to dam the Tigris River to block retreating rebels.

In the future, climate change is expected to extend and intensify drought in Earth’s driest regions and disrupt normal water flows from mountain snowcaps in Europe, North America and Central Asia. “Climate change has the potential to exacer- bate tensions over water as precipi- tation patterns change, declining by as much as 60 percent in some areas,” warned a recent report by a panel of retired U.S. generals and ad- mirals convened by CNA, a think tank with longstanding ties to the military. “The potential for escalating tensions, economic disruption and armed conflict is great,” said the re- port, “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.” 64

On the simplest level, the report said, climate change “has the poten- tial to create sustained natural and hu- manitarian disasters on a scale far be- yond those we see today.” Already, it

Mountain Snowpack Is Shrinking The amount of snow covering the globe’s highest mountains has been shrinking over the past half-century, upsetting crucial seasonal water flows that restock rivers, lakes, reservoirs and aquifers. Scientists think short-term climate conditions like El Niño and long-term warming caused by climate change are to blame. By century’s end, only 16 percent of New Zealand’s current snowpack will remain.

Source: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, http://picturethis.pnl.gov/picturet.nsf/by+id/ AMER-6PWV.V?opendocument.

Snowpack Now and Projected in 2100

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said, Darfur, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Angola, Nigeria, Cameroon and West- ern Sahara have all been hit hard by tensions that can be traced in part to environmental causes. 65 If the drought continues, the report said, more people will leave their homelands, increasing migration pressures within Africa and into Europe. 66

The impact will be especially acute in the Middle East, where about two- thirds of the inhabitants depend on water sources outside their borders. Water remains a potential flashpoint between the Israelis and Palestinians, who lack established rights to the Jor- dan River and receive only about 10 percent of the water used by Israel’s West Bank settlers. 67 “Only Egypt, Iran and Turkey have abundant fresh water resources,” the CNA report said.

The military advisers urged the Unit- ed States to take a stronger national and international role in stabilizing cli- mate change and to create global part- nerships to help less-developed nations confront climate impacts. 68

Currently, there is only a weak in- ternational foundation for water col- laboration, according to the U.N. Human Development report. While a 1997 U.N. convention lays out princi- ples for cooperation, only 14 nations have signed it, and it has no work- able enforcement mechanism. In 55 years, the International Court of Jus- tice has decided only one case in- volving international rivers. 69

It is possible, however, that as the awareness of climate impacts on water supplies deepens, so will the urgency for governments to respond. “Unlike the challenges that we are used to dealing with, these will come upon us extremely slowly, but come they will, and they will be grinding and inexorable,” said former Vice Adm. Richard H. Truly, a former astronaut who headed the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Ad- ministration (NASA) and served as a CNA consultant. 70 “They will affect every nation, and all simultaneously.”

BACKGROUND Taming Water

The ruins of irrigation canals 8,000years old have been found in Mesopotamia. 71 Remains of water-stor- age dams 5,000 years old survive in Egypt and Jordan. Humans have been using waterwheels for milling and threshing since the 1st century B.C., and by 1291 China had completed its Grand Canal running nearly 1,800 kilometers between Beijing and Hangzhou. 72 Water power drove mining, metal drilling, tex- tile and milling industries at the dawn of the Industrial Age. 73 In the United

States, the opening of the Niagara Falls hydroelectric power station in 1896 — built by American entrepreneur and in- ventor George Westinghouse and backed by financier J. P. Morgan and others — inaugurated water’s use to gen- erate electric power. 74

But these early accomplishments were dwarfed in the 20th century by nearly 100 years of massive dam pro- jects that have transformed most of the world’s major rivers. Between 1950 and 2000, the number of dams high- er than 50 feet increased sevenfold — to more than 41,000 structures im- pounding 14 percent of the world’s average river runoff. 75 By 2000, large dams were supplying nearly a fifth of all electrical power worldwide.

Dams also have been critical in the rapid expansion of irrigated farming. “Half of the world’s large dams are built exclusively for irrigation, sup- porting about 12 to 16 percent of world food production, according to the World Commission on Dams.” 76

About 12 percent of large dams were constructed specifically to pro- vide drinking water and sanitation (and a similar percentage were built to con- trol flooding), and many have multi- ple uses. Whether used for energy, community water, flood control or agri- culture, dams have been a key tool of economic growth, according to the commission. Typically, however, the full consequences of such giant pro- jects were not taken into considera- tion, the commission said. In the past century, the world built, on average, one large dam per day without ask- ing whether it was getting a fair re- turn from the $2 trillion investment, said South African Minister of Educa- tion Kader Asmal, who chaired the commission. 77

The dam-building blitz was enabled by political bias in favor of dams. From the Aswan High Dam in Egypt to the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, big dams have stood as pre-

LOOMING WATER CRISIS

Continued on p. 40

China Leads World in Dam Building China has three times as many dams as the United States and more than all the next 11 countries combined. Dams typically generate electricity, control flooding and provide water for irrigation.

Source: Peter H. Gleick, et al., “The World's Water: 2002-2003,” Pacific Institute, 2002

Countries with the Most Dams

1. China 22,000 2. United States 6,575 3. India 4,291 4. Japan 2,675 5. Spain 1,196 6. Canada 793 7. South Korea 765 8. Turkey 625 9. Brazil 594

10. France 569 11. South Africa 539 12. Mexico 537

February 2008 39Available online: www.globalresearcher.com

Chronology 19th Century The industrial age and urban- ization create critical need for municipal water treatment and sanitation services.

1848 The Public Health Act, followed in 1852 by the Metropolitan Water Act, lead to investments in water treat- ment and sanitation that dramatically reduce waterborne illnesses in Britain by the end of the century.

1876 Berlin city planner James Hobrecht starts work on drainage system and waterworks that channels sewage to fields as fertilizer. He designs similar systems for Moscow, Cairo and Tokyo.

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1900-1980 Governments around the globe launch major dam construction.

1902 The Aswan Dam on the Nile River in Egypt is completed to control flooding and regulate water flow for agriculture.

1910 Chlorination begins in the United States. Typhoid fever from polluted drinking water falls from 25 deaths per 100,000 people to almost zero.

1936 Hoover Dam on the Colorado River is opened, fulfilling an agreement among Southwestern states and cities to share the river’s flow.

1945 Large-scale groundwater irrigation begins expanding in the Western United States, aided by rural electrifi-

cation and innovations in pumping and irrigating technology.

1986 Major dam construction has largely stopped in the U.S. but continues in Asia.

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1980s Britain’s public utilities are sold to private firms in the late 1980s, triggering a wave of water-system privatiza- tion worldwide.

1994 Construction begins on the Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River, designed to be the largest in the world. More than 1 million people will have to be relocated as the river rises.

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2000s Drought spreads worldwide, heightening concern about climate change’s impact on water scarcity. Privatization strategies shift.

2000 Violent public protests against higher water rates force cancella- tion of a water-privatization plan in Cochabamba, Bolivia. But priva- tization continues in China, India and other parts of the world. . . . U.N. adopts the Millennium Devel- opment Goals calling for halving the number of people without ac- cess to safe water and adequate sanitation by 2015.

2002 China approves massive South-to- North Water Diversion Project, which will eventually link the

country’s four major rivers to bring water from the south to the arid north.

2005 Group of Eight industrialized na- tions pledge to double their aid for water, sanitation and other de- velopment projects in poorer na- tions by 2010.

2006 Waterborne-disease epidemics strike Karachi, Lahore and other Pakistani cities, caused by the leakage of sewage and industrial wastes into damaged water-distribution pipelines. . . . U.N. Human Devel- opment Report warns that without a major increase in investment, im- provements in water and sanitation services will fall far short of the Millennium Development Goals.

2007 Multi-year drought afflicts China, the Horn of Africa, Turkey, Aus- tralia, Spain and the U.S. Sun Belt. . . . A director of the Three Gorges Project warns that rising waters behind the dam could cause “water pollution, landslides and other geological disasters,” but other officials later say environ- mental problems will be amelio- rated. . . . The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that freshwater resources will de- crease in large river basins over the next decade due to drought. . . . Drought prompts several Australian cities to commission new desalina- tion plants. Algeria also has a major plant in construction.

2008 The scarcity of water in key agricul- tural areas has contributed to soaring world prices for wheat, soybeans, corn, rice and poultry, and the trend is likely to continue this year, say agricultural forecasters.

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eminent symbols of governments’ en- gineering prowess and the use of state power to control devastating floodwaters and feed economic ex- pansion. “Colossal engineering works bestow big contracts and big bene- fits, divide up waters, hold them fast, channel them away from some and give them to others,” says author Ward. “It has always been politics that start the bulldozers moving.” 78

While dams helped expand sup- plies of drinking water, hydropower

and irrigation water, they also attract population expansion that eventually strains the new resources. And until recently, the commission said, policy- makers have not fairly considered the damaging impact dams have on downstream rivers and aquifers and the populations that are forced to move to make room for reservoirs.

Resistance to major new dam pro- jects emerged with the rise of the en- vironmental movement in the 1970s, particularly in Europe and the United States, as advocates pointed to the

harm caused by dam construction. In the industrial world, “it is now more likely that a dam will be torn down than a new one will go up,” says Ward.

But in China, South Asia and South America, dams are “multiplying like mushrooms,” she writes. 79 If China’s new Three Gorges Dam — the world’s largest hydroelectric project — had been built midway through the past century, it might have been considered one of the world’s great engineering feats. The main wall of the massive, 60-story struc- ture spanning the Yangtze River was

LOOMING WATER CRISIS

Continued from p. 38

F or millennia, the nomadic Tuareg people have lived by herding, migrating across vast rangelands south of the Sahara Desert to water and graze their animals. But

decades of drought are destroying the traditional Tuareg way of life — killing herds, drying up grazing lands and forcing many to settle in villages.

“We used to saddle the camel and put all the nice things on its back and put on our nice clothes and go,” Tuareg chief Mohamed Ag Mata told a reporter last year. “We were afraid of nothing.” 1

But the changes, paradoxically, offer hope for a better ex- istence to women and children in the male-dominated Tuareg culture — giving them access to the employment, education and social rights that will give them a greater say in commu- nity water policy.

Increasingly, educating and empowering women is seen as an effective way to expand access to clean water across the developing world. Virtually every major international organi- zation dealing with water scarcity is calling for change in women’s decision-making roles, including The World Bank, the U.N. Human Development Programme, the World Health Organization, the World Water Forum, the World Commission on Dams and the Stockholm-based Global Water Partnership.

In the developing world, the job of hauling water rests, lit- erally, almost entirely on women’s shoulders. A UNICEF study in 23 sub-Saharan countries found that a quarter of women spent 30 minutes to an hour each day collecting and carrying water, and 19 percent spent an hour or more. In Mile Gully, an impoverished rural area of Jamaica, hauling the family’s water can take a woman two to five hours a day. 2

The high incidence of waterborne disease caused by the lack of clean water further burdens women in poor, rural com- munities, because they are the primary caregivers for the sick.

“Should a woman care for a sick child or spend two hours collecting water?” asks the latest U.N. human development re- port. “Should girls be kept home from school to collect water, freeing time for mothers to grow food or generate income? Or should they be sent to school to gain the skills and assets to escape poverty?” 3

But despite having to bear the greatest burden caused by a lack of water, women “play no role in the decision making for their communities,” said Margaret Mwangi, a specialist in forestry and environmental issues who has worked for UNESCO. 4

Women’s lack of property rights prevents them from having a say in how water is distributed in their provinces. Women own less than 15 percent of the world’s land and in many coun- tries cannot legally own property separately from their husbands. “Lacking rights to land, millions of women in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are denied formal membership rights to par- ticipate in water-user association meetings,” according to the U.N. “Human Development Report 2006.” 5 And even those who are welcomed at irrigation-association meetings often cannot find the time. “Meetings are on Friday nights. At that time, after cook- ing for my husband and the kids, I still have a lot of work to do around the house,” said a woman in Ecuador. “Even if I go to the meeting, it’s only to hear what the men have to say. Men are the ones who talk and discuss.” 6

Unless both water and gender policies are reformed, water scarcity threatens to worsen women’s plight, says the Sri Lanka- based International Water Management Institute. 7 Studies rec- ommend a wide range of strategies to strengthen women’s roles in gaining access to water and sanitation services, including micro-credit and micro-insurance programs that target women; training programs in rural irrigation and sanitation processes; creating rural women’s councils and broadcasting radio pro- grams on women’s issues. 8

Empowering Women May Quench Thirst ‘Should girls be kept home from school to collect water?’

February 2008 41Available online: www.globalresearcher.com

completed in 2006, and by the end of 2008 it is expected to deliver up to 18 million kilowatts per hour — nearly a tenth of the electricity needs of China’s surging economy. 80 But in today’s per- spective, the monumental structure sym- bolizes the threat of environmental de- struction caused by major dam construction.

The gargantuan project’s human and environmental costs have alarmed op- ponents. According to the Chinese gov- ernment, more than a million river- side residents were forced to move as

the water rose behind the dam. The rising water levels have triggered some massive landslides on the riverbanks, and a senior government official warned last September that if such ecological and environmental dangers are not dealt with, “the project could lead to a catastrophe.” 81 But more recently, Chinese officials have insisted the pro- ject will be operated safely. 82

Some water experts still advocate new, smaller dams in developing countries to control flooding, store irrigation water and generate electricity. For instance,

most of India’s rainfall occurs in about 100 hours during the monsoon season. While reservoirs capture some of these torrents, most escape to the sea. 83

The 4th World Water Forum in Mex- ico City in 2006 cited Norway as a role model for the value of dams. “Elec- tricity from hydropower was the key factor in transforming Norway from one of the poorest countries in Eu- rope a century ago to the industrial- ized and wealthy nation of today,” said Anita Utseth, Norway’s deputy minis- ter for petroleum and energy. 84

But gender traditions can prove hard to change. Along the Bay of Bengal coast, decision-making and financial control over irrigation systems in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, has been decentralized, giving more authority to local communities. Nevertheless, only 4 to 5 percent of the women surveyed in two districts believed they could influence decisions in village meetings. “Women, and particularly poor women, rarely par- ticipate,” the human development report concluded. 9

Experts say progress for women requires a push from the bottom and pressure from the top. Legislation in Uganda, for instance, requires that all agencies — from national to village levels — include at least 30 percent female representation.

“Affirmative action may not remove cultural barriers,” the U.N. report said, “but it does challenge their legitimacy.” 10

That may even be happening among the Tuaregs, says Hadi- jatou, describing her new life in a village near Timbuktu in Mali. “Before, everything was given to us by the men. When you are given what you need by other people, you are de- pendent on them. But when you are producing what you need, you depend on nobody. So life is far better now.” 11

1 Richard Harris, “Drought Forces Desert Nomads to Settle Down,” National Public Radio, July 2, 2007. 2 Polioptro Martinez Austria and Paul van Hofwegen, “Synthesis of the 4th World Water Forum,” Mexico City, 2006 p. 4, www.worldwaterfo- rum4.org.mx/files/report/SynthesisoftheForum.pdf. 3 “Human Development Report 2006 — Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis,” U.N. Development Programme, 2006, p. 87; http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2006/. 4 Margaret Mwangi, “Gender and Drought Hazards in the Rangelands of the Great Horn of Africa,” Women & Environments International Magazine, Spring 2007, p. 21. 5 “Human Development Report,” op. cit., p. 194. 6 Ibid. 7 David Molden, ed., “Summary,” Water for Food, Water for Life: A Compre- hensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture, International Water Management Institute, p. 10, www.iwmi.cgiar.org/assessment/files_new/syn- thesis/Summary_SynthesisBook.pdf.

8 Austria and Hofwegen, op. cit., pp. 43, 63, 96. 9 “Human Development Report,” op. cit., p 193. 10 Ibid., p. 194. 11 Harris, op. cit.

Women and girls in poor countries, like these in Pakistan, bear the greatest burden from a lack of potable water.

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As Ward notes, “In some places, if no reservoirs are built, poor people will be denied the means to improve their lives.” 85

Regulating Water

Who owns water? What rights dowater users have? How should conflicts be resolved?

The globe’s oldest recorded societies were formed not only for defense but also to try to control the flow of water in rivers that were crucial to farming.

Under Roman law, water resources were the property of the state, which was responsible for their development and protection. Islamic water law in the parched Middle East followed a simi- lar path — irrigation canals and ditch- es had to be adequately planned and spaced to prevent infringement on oth- ers’ water sources. 86

But ancient codes also recognized that landowners did not have to share well water in times of scarcity, and people living closest to rivers and lakes had first claim on their waters. “The cistern nearest to a water channel is

filled first, in the interests of peace,” said the 12th-century Jewish theologian and philosopher Maimonides. 87

Eventually, the doctrine of “ripari- an” rights — giving those living clos- est to water the first claim on its use — became merged with a “public trust” doctrine, holding that water was a common resource to be managed by the state for the common benefit. One person’s use of water could not infringe on a neighbor’s reasonable needs. The doctrine was embraced by many countries in Europe — includ- ing Britain, France and Spain — which then exported the principle to their colonies abroad. 88

But in the Western United States, Chile and Mexico, private water rights were recognized, particularly after the 1848 gold rush in the United States. A miner finding a gold seam would claim water from the nearest creek to wash dirt away from precious nuggets. His claim established a “first-in-time, first- in-use” priority allowing him to take as much as he needed. 89 This “prior ap- propriation” doctrine was a starter’s gun for unchecked diversion and exploita- tion of water resources to create farms and cities in the arid West. 90

Of course, in most legal debates about water, individual rights are sub- merged by political elites, rulers and dom- inant factions. For instance, Senegalese law provides for a democratic distribu- tion of irrigated lands. But in practice, tribal nobles’ descendants still claim the lion’s share of the land and allocate rights to powerful outsiders, including military leaders, politicians and judges. 91

In Central Asia during Soviet rule, for instance, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan — which abut the Syr Darya and Amu Darya river basins — shared the reservoir and hydropower output from Kyrgyzstan’s largest reservoir. Now, as separate states, their cooper- ation has virtually ended, according to a U.N. report. Kyrgyzstan is holding on to more of its reservoir volume in order to increase its hydropower ex-

LOOMING WATER CRISIS

China’s 60-stor y Three Gorges Dam — the world’s largest hydroelectric project — is expected to deliver up to 18 million kilowatts per hour by the end of 2008, nearly a tenth of

China’s electricity needs. Critics say the Yangtze River structure symbolizes environmental destruction that can be caused by major dam construction. More than a million

riverside residents were forced to move as the water rose behind the dam.

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ports, severely reducing irrigation flows in the other two countries. A con- structive dialogue “has been conspic- uously absent,” according to the U.N. Human Development Report. 92

Two international treaties — the Helsinki Rules of 1966, adopted by the International Law Association, and articles adopted by the U.N. Interna- tional Law Commission — specify how cross-border water disputes should be resolved. Rivers that divide nations, according to the treaties — must be considered common resources, not under any one nation’s control. They also advocate a policy of “no harm” — each riparian nation has the right to “equitable utilization” of a shared water supply, and a nation’s water use should not damage its neighbors’ water needs. Prior appropriation claims are not allowed, and countries are called on to share accurate informa- tion on water resources. 93

Before fair water-use policies can be expected, governments must con- sider the needs of the poor and po- litically weak, whose water needs are usually greatest, says water expert San- dra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project in Massachusetts. That means “adding seats around the table,” she says. 94 For example, Ghana suc- cessfully expanded its water and san- itation services in recent years after water policy was decentralized, and village and district water councils were formed. The result: improved planning and more reasonable priorities for water funding, according to the U.N. 95

Misusing Water

In Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, which liesbetween the international airport and the city’s financial center, an estimat- ed 1 million Indians live in huts and shanties. With only one toilet for every 1,440 people, gutters overflow with waste in the rainy season, turning the streets into open sewers. 96

Such unsanitary conditions in devel- oping countries contribute to a plague of diarrhea that not only kills an estimated 1.8 million children across the globe each year but also repeatedly sickens many times that number, leaving them mal- nourished and vulnerable to other dis- eases and keeping them from school. 97

Trachoma, spread by a fly that breeds in human feces, afflicts nearly 6 mil- lion people worldwide, causing wide- spread blindness. The disease “is a passport to poverty,” says the U.N.’s “Human Development Report,” because it prevents victims from working. 98

“At the start of the 21st century one in five people living in the developing world — some 1.1 billion people in all — lack access to clean water,” and nearly half the developing world has no access to adequate sanitation. 99

Some of the same conditions ex- isted in Europe and the United States during most of the 19th century, as farm families migrated to vast urban slums. During the summer in 1858, the stench of untreated sewage in the Thames River (called the “Great Stink” by the London Times) forced the Par- liament to close temporarily. 100 In the

A Masai herdsman in Kenya’s Rift Valley tends to a dying sheep in Januar y 2006. Today 850 million people live in areas where adequate food supplies are at risk because of drought —

two-thirds of them in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where the impact of climate change on food production is expected to be worst.

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1890s Britain’s infant mortality rate was about the same as Nigeria’s today.

Water-treatment legislation in mid- 19th-century Britain mandated creation of municipal water companies, followed

by an expansion of sanitation services after 1880. By 1910, the country’s rate of infant mortality had fallen by near- ly 40 percent. The critical factor for change, according to some experts,

was an extension of voting rights in Britain beyond property-owning class- es to those who lacked clean water and sanitation, creating a political con- stituency for reforms. 101

LOOMING WATER CRISIS

A fter wildfires devastated parts of Southern California and dry winds parched the Southwest last summer, New Mexico’s Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democratic candidate

for president, made a startling proposal. “States like Wisconsin are awash in water,” Richardson told

the Las Vegas Sun, proposing that water from the Great Lakes be piped to his state. With nearly 20 percent of the world’s fresh water, the five vast lakes are an irresistible target to promoters, politicians — and potentially — corporate water suppliers.

“You’re going to see increasing pressure to gain access to this supply,” said Aaron Packman, a professor of civil and environ- mental engineering at Northwestern University. “Clearly, it’s a case of different regional interests competing for this water.” 1

In 1985, Quebec provincial officials floated a plan to sell Cana- dian river water to the high plains states. The Great Replenish- ment and Northern Development Canal (GRAND) envisioned pumping river water from Quebec into a reservoir in Ontario. From there the water could travel by aqueduct to the Great Lakes and then by canal to the American plains. Nothing came of it.

Even grander was the North American Water and Power Alliance in the 1960s, which proposed to dam dozens of north-flowing rivers in Canada’s western provinces, channeling their waters into a new reservoir 500 miles long — about the distance from Pittsburgh to Chicago — to irrigate the high plains and refill the Colorado River’s flows to California. But the half-trillion-dollar price tag sank the proposal. And its environmental cost would have been “ungras- pable,” says Canadian journalist Marq de Villiers, author of Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource. 2

The idea still seems to stir anxieties in Canada. An off-hand re- mark by President George W. Bush in 2001 about the benefits of Canadian water exports to the United States caused a brief uproar, and last year Canada’s Liberal Party Leader Stephane Dion accused the government in Ottawa of trying to put the matter back on the U.S.-Canada agenda — a claim both governments denied. 3

Mega-project dreams still survive in China, however, which is planning a series of canals to carry Yangtze River water thou- sands of miles to the Yellow River and on to the huge cities of Beijing and Tianjin. 4

And in 2004, Israel agreed to purchase the equivalent of 35 million gallons of freshwater per day from Turkey’s Manavgat River, to be shipped aboard tankers. Turkish water exports to Cyprus and other water-short destinations were also under con- sideration. The agreement was put on hold in 2006 after high-

er oil prices made tanker transportation uneconomical, ac- cording to both countries. 5

And then there are the slightly zany ideas, such as Calgary entrepreneur James Cran’s plan to move water by sea inside floating 5,000-ton plastic bags, or towing Arctic icebergs to dis- tant metropolises. 6

Most monumental water-moving schemes, however, trigger intense opposition. Gov. Richardson’s proposal, for instance, is opposed by eight Great Lakes-area states and two Canadian provinces, and drew a terse, unequivocal “No” from Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm. 7

1 Tim Jones, “Great Lakes key front in water wars,” The Chicago Tribune, Oct. 28, 2007, www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-water_bdoct28,1,5145249.story. 2 Marq de Villiers, Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource (1999), p. 260. 3 Launce Rake, “Canadians fearful of U.S. water grab,” Las Vegas Sun, May 28, 2006. See also Bruce Campion-Smith and Susan Delacourt, “Secret talks underway, Dion claims,” The Toronto Star, Aug. 18, 2007, p. 18. 4 Diane Raines Ward, Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly and the Politics of Thirst (2002), p. 171. 5 Josef Federman, “Israel, Turkey put landmark water agreement into deep freeze,” The Associated Press, April 5, 2006 6 de Villiers, op. cit., p. 277. 7 Jones, op. cit.

Water Schemes Range From Monumental to Zany Many are costly and controversial.

The monumental California Aqueduct brings vitally needed water 444 miles from to Southern California farmers and residents.

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But the cost of expanding sanita- tion services in the developing world today would be immense. A study led by former International Monetary Fund President Michael Camdessus es- timates that closing the sanitation ser- vices gap could cost $87 billion over the next two decades. 102

Experts today debate which must come first in the developing world: good governance or solutions to water and sanitation needs. In The World’s Water 2006-2007, the authors conclude that “eradicating corruption and politi- cal interference and ensuring the par- ticipation of all stakeholders will be crit- ical to the successful governance of water.” 103 The 1,320-km (820 miles) Rhine River — long called “the sewer of Europe” — was cleaned up after a 1986 industrial fire in Basel, Switzer- land, allowed more than 30 tons of pesticides, dyes, mercury and other poisons to spill into the river. Millions of fish were killed, and major cities had to close their municipal water in- takes. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a former environmental minis- ter, has called the “rebirth of the Rhine . . . one of the great environmental success stories of the century.” 104

But to the east, the blighted Danube testifies to the damage caused by self- ish, beggar-thy-neighbor policies by the nations along its 1,770-mile course. Efforts to reengineer the river began in the 16th century with projects to steer its annual floods into canals or trap them behind huge dams. Histor- ically, vast amounts of untreated human wastes and toxic industrial effluents were also dumped into the river, a situation that worsened during the Cold War. Soviet-era bosses had no scruples about flushing wastes into rivers, and Moscow pushed Hungarian and Czech governments to divert the Danube into man-made waterways in order to speed Russian barge traffic. Parts of the project were begun, but before it went very far, the Soviet Union collapsed.

In the 1990s, a third of the Danube’s flow was being taken for human use — an extraction rate that researchers warned would be unsustainable if the vast region served by the river faced continued growth and a prolonged drought. 105

Today the Danube nations are working toward the river’s recovery, and the European Union has pledged $3.3 billion to help. 106

Ocean Waters

As a last resort, some wealthy na-tions and cities facing serious shortages of freshwater — including the Persian Gulf states, Israel, Singa- pore and a handful of cities in Cali- fornia, Florida and Australia — have turned to desalination of the oceans’ limitless resources.

More than 10,000 desalting plants were in operation or contracted for construction in January 2005, with a total capacity of 9.6 billion gallons per day. At present, however, desalination plants have the capability to provide just three one-thousandths of daily global freshwater consumption. 107

Governments usually subsidize up to a third of the consumer cost for desalinated water because it costs many times more than typical urban water service. 108 Improved technology and engineering dropped average desali- nation costs from $1.60 per 264 gal- lons in 1990 to about 60 cents in newer plants by 2002. But construc- tion costs have risen recently due to higher steel prices, and operating costs have climbed sharply as energy prices have risen. (Energy costs account for one-third to more than one-half of the expense of desalinating water.) The safe disposal of the brine residue from desalination remains an envi- ronmental issue that is still not well researched, according to “The World’s Water” report. 109

Some experts believe desalination will begin to grow at double-digit rates

as water becomes scarce and prices for conventional water rise. 110 For ex- ample, California had 20 desalination plants in the construction pipeline in 2006, which could increase California’s desalination capacity 100-fold, provid- ing about 7 percent of the freshwater the state used in 2000.

CURRENT SITUATION

Melting Snows

The deep snowpack covering theworld’s mountains in winter is a renewable gift of nature — melting in spring to restock rivers, lakes, reser- voirs, aquifers and eventually flowing back into the ocean. Then evaporating ocean water turns into snowfall in the mountains, repeating the cycle. But the snowpacks have been shrinking — and melting earlier — over the past half-century, upsetting crucial seasonal water flows. 111

In parts of the Western United States, for example, the snowpack is down to 40 percent of normal. While short-term climate conditions like El Niño are part- ly to blame, Earth’s predicted warming trend is expected to cause dramatic changes in the future. The U.S. De- partment of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has forecast, for in- stance, that by century’s end South America’s Andes Mountains will have lost half of their winter snow cover, and ranges in Europe and the U.S. West nearly half. 112 (See figure, p. 37.)

“Our main reservoir is snow, and it’s going away,” says Phillip Mote, a pro- fessor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. 113

The early melting is seen as an in- dication that climate change is already

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affecting water scarcity. “Some of what’s happening with the early snow melts could be due to variations based on ocean circulation,” said Gregg Garfin, project manager of the University of Arizona’s Institute for the Study of Plan- et Earth. “But there’s a pretty large fraction that can’t be explained that way, and we think that’s due to in- creasing temperatures.” 114

The amount of snow melting into the Colorado River Basin has declined by 10 to 30 percent over the last 30 years, according to Brad Udall, director of the University of Colorado’s Western Water Assessment. 115

Earlier melting has caused unsea- sonal spring flooding in parts of the West, 116 while a decade of drought has left forests more vulnerable to fires and beetle infestations, said Tom Swetnam, director of the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Re- search. “Lots of people think climate change and the ecological responses

are 50 to 100 years away,” he said. “But it’s not. It’s happening now.” 117

In the American Southwest — as in other arid regions of the world — drought is the biggest, most persistent enemy, but scientists are divided over how much of the current drought is due to long-term climate change.

A report by scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Pre-

diction and Research — Britain’s weather office — cites evidence that rising emissions of greenhouse gases have exacerbated drought conditions during the past half-century. Green- house gases — the carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone produced from burning fossil fuels — are causing the Earth’s temperature to rise by helping to trap the sun’s heat, creating a greenhouse effect, ac- cording to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Further research is required,” said the Hadley Centre report, not-

ing “the potential seriousness of fu- ture climate change impacts if CO2 emissions continue to increase sub- stantially.” 118

These judgments are still hedged. “It is quite possible that . . . climate change may be having an impact on droughts, not only in the U.S. but around the world,” says Michael J. Hayes, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. But that’s not clear yet. “I don’t think we can use what is happening today as an argument for climate change. It should open our eyes to the potential impacts that might occur.”

Looking further ahead into the cen- tury, scientists warn that drought is like- ly to persist over longer periods, hitting hardest at the world’s most-vulnerable arid regions. 119

A trend toward extreme weather events, ranging from drought and high temperature to violent storms and flood- ing, is already evident, according to the National Center for Atmospheric Research. 120 Global warming is like- ly to fuel even more extreme weath- er, center researchers said. “There’s a two-third’s chance there will be a dis- aster,” says Nobel laureate Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley Na- tional Laboratory, “and that’s in the best scenario.” 121

The Southwestern United States and other regions appear headed, by mid-century, to a condition of per- manent drought caused by global warming, concluded Columbia Uni- versity’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Obser- vatory, after surveying recent studies. “[G]lobal warming not only causes water shortage through early snow melt, which leads to significant water shortage in the summer over the South- west, but it also aggregates the prob- lem by reducing precipitation,” said Mingfang Ting, senior research scien- tist at Lamont-Doherty and co-author of the survey. 122

Continued on p. 48

Wildfires destroyed hundreds of homes in Malibu, Calif., last October during a severe drought, reigniting the perennial national debate about the

folly of building homes in water-scarce areas.

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At Issue: Should water be privatized?Yes

yes TERRY L. ANDERSON EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, PERC, SENIOR FELLOW, HOOVER INSTITUTION

WRITTEN FOR CQ GLOBAL RESEARCHER FEBRUARY, 2008

no one washes a rental car” is a truism that suggests thatownership is crucial to stewardship. We also might say,“No one conserves water” for the same reason — too often it’s not clear who benefits from conserving water because it’s unclear who owns the water. As long as water’s cheap, why fix the leaky faucet or switch to an efficient irrigation system?

Making the ownership link is relatively easy, because water is already claimed by someone — either a municipality, indi- vidual farmers or a government agency.

In practice, however, claims compete with one another, es- pecially when water is scarce. Miners and farmers on the Western frontier in the 19th century devised the prior-appro- priation system, whereby water owners were allowed to re- solve conflicts by moving water to higher-valued uses, and trades between farmers have gone on for a century.

The recent drought in the Southeast has raised a red flag about scarcity. The best mechanism for allocating water is to clarify ownership among municipal, agricultural, industrial and environmental users and allow trades. If Atlanta must buy water from lower-valued agricultural users, farmers will have an incentive to save water and sell it, and municipal consumers will face a higher price and thus an incentive to conserve.

Some worry that water markets will put undue burden on the poor while the rich continue enjoying their country club lawns. But the poor could be issued water stamps, akin to food stamps, for buying water. Or suppliers could charge less for minimum amounts of water needed for necessities and in- crease the price of water for luxuries.

When water rights are allocated through political processes, the poor usually do not get many of the initial rights, forcing them to purchase water if they are to get any. And data from the Chilean water markets suggest that the poor don’t fare much better when water is traded on the open market. Per- haps there should be some guaranteed survival quantity of water that is a basic human right.

The problem is not a failure of water markets, but a failure of political allocation, which will not be rectified by prevent- ing water markets from delivering water at a profit to all, re- gardless of income.

As water scarcity increases in the 21st century, water bu- reaucracies will bring more conflict, while water markets will foster more cooperation. With this choice, it will be impossible to keep a good water market down.No

WENONAH HAUTER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR FOOD & WATER WATCH

WRITTEN FOR CQ GLOBAL RESEARCHER FEBRUARY, 2008

in the early 1990s, multinational corporations began to viewwater services as an important, new profit center — especial-ly in the United States, where 85 percent of water utilities are public. With 1.2 billion people in the developing world lacking ac- cess to safe drinking water, the corporations lobbied the World Bank to condition its loans for water services on privatization.

Since then, numerous failed ventures have proven that the cost of privatizing water is too high. It was certainly too high for Tanzania, which terminated a 10-year contract with Biwater after two years of poor management left the government short $3.25 million and the poorest citizens of Dar es Salaam with- out water. Likewise, massive rate hikes and poor management led Bolivia to end a 40-year contract with Bechtel after only a few months. Similar ventures in Argentina, the Philippines, Indonesia, South Africa and the United Kingdom also have proven unworkable.

In the United States, many municipalities have considered privatization to upgrade their aging systems, but the ventures have been plagued by corruption, high rates, poor service and public outrage. Atlanta terminated a 20-year contract with Unit- ed Water 16 years early due to bungled emergency responses, boil-water alerts, discolored water and billing difficulties. In 2002, a coalition of citizens’ organizations in New Orleans de- feated what would have been the largest water-privatization ini- tiative in the United States. Meanwhile, residents of Stockton, Calif., sued the city for failing to perform a proper environmen- tal review of the city’s water-privatization contract.

Given this abysmal track record, new solutions are neces- sary to meet water needs. For example, some U.S. cities have cut costs by improving internal management. Phoenix saved $77 million by working with a labor management team to op- timize staffing, organize self-directed work teams and utilize new technology. Similarly, San Diego saved $37 million by developing a more cost-conscious management system.

Safeguarding our water systems is a vital public responsibil- ity. Yet, shockingly, the Environmental Protection Agency esti- mates that each year we fall $22 billion short of our water in- frastructure spending needs. To address this funding gap, we must ensure that public utilities can upgrade and maintain their systems without turning to privatization.

At Food & Water Watch, we support a Clean Water Trust Fund to help ensure that the future of America’s water lies in publicly accountable management and secure, clean, affordable water for all.

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Wasted Water

Although Atlantans worry that fallinglevels in Lake Lanier are jeopardiz- ing their drinking water, they might be surprised to learn that up to 18 percent of the city’s water is being lost through leaky pipes and wastefulness. 123 In Lon- don, the mayor asked the Thames Water company to stanch the 238 million gal- lons per day being lost through old, leaky water pipes rather than build a costly desalination plant to purify Thames River water. Regulators have

since approved the project because of the urgency of the shortages. 124

U.S. water systems lose an esti- mated 15 percent to 25 percent of their water through leakage, and older or poorly maintained networks around the world lose more than 40 percent. However, notes American water con- servation consultant Amy L. Vickers, water leakage is “chronically underes- timated, ignored, or treated as a tired ‘Unsolved Mystery,’ ” by utilities. 125

In coastal cities, vast amounts of rainwater and melting snow are “ba- sically lost,” flowing into storm drains that flow out to sea, says the U.S. Ge- ological Survey’s Hirsch. “The urban

design is to get rid of it as fast as you can: get it off the roof, off the street, into the storm sewers and rush it off into the ocean, never used by any- body.” Extravagant water consumption continues in wealthy residential areas and in farming regions where ineffi- cient surface and sprinkler irrigation systems waste up to 25 percent of the water they use. 126 Efficient “drip” ir- rigation systems — which deliver water directly onto the crops, reduc- ing evaporation to only 5 percent — are used on less than 1 percent of ir- rigated lands worldwide, largely be- cause of higher equipment costs. 127

But according to Vickers and other experts, a conservation ethic is be- ginning to emerge, particularly where water supplies are threatened by drought. For example, aggressive con- servation strategies in Boston and Al- buquerque, N.M., are reducing sys- temwide demand by 25 and 18 percent, respectively. “A few other systems, such as New York City, have also realized substantial water savings and waste- water volume reductions that have al- lowed them to avert major infrastruc- ture expansions,” Vickers notes. 128

In the United States, some states have begun requiring cities to use re- claimed wastewater (“graywater”) to

irrigate parks and golf courses. Illi- nois, Florida, California, Arizona and Ohio reported the largest increases. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the amount of graywater used more than doubled between the 1970s and 1995. 129

Water conservation also is ex- panding in the construction field. In the United States, Canada, Brazil, India and three-dozen other nations, water-saving green architecture for commercial and government build- ings is growing in popularity, but the large-scale use of water-conservation practices by water utilities is still “very rare,” says Vickers. 130

Hirsch says policymakers must rec- ognize that rivers and lakes need sus- tained flows of water to maintain their long-term environmental viability — and their full range of usefulness. Al- though this movement is “still in its infancy,” at least 70 nations have begun programs to conserve or restore water flows in rivers. 131 For example, a $10 billion project in Florida aims to re- store the natural flow of the Kissim- mee River, and programs in Australia, Israel, Finland, Thailand, South Africa and Zambia would release flood wa- ters from dams to move sediments downstream and expand plant and an- imal habitats.

“When given a chance, rivers often heal,” write the Global Water Policy Project’s Postel and Brian Richter, a staff director at the Nature Conservancy, in Rivers for Life. 132

OUTLOOK Thirst and Hunger

The world’s population, now about6 billion, is likely to jump by more than a third by 2050, reaching nearly

Continued from p. 46

“If 12 jumbo jets [full of children] were crashing

every day, the world would want to do something

about it. They would want to find out

why it was happening.”

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February 2008 49Available online: www.globalresearcher.com

9 billion, according to the U.N. 133

Such a large increase will cause not only thirst but also hunger, says the International Water Management Inst- tute. The average European uses about 13 gallons of water a day for drink- ing, cooking and sanitation. But the food an individual consumes in a typ- ical day requires 800 to 900 gallons to grow. 134

“The world needs roughly 70 times more water to produce food than it needs for cities,” says Rijsberman, for- mer director of the International Water Management Institute in Sri Lanka. 135

Since 1950, water withdrawals for human use have tripled and irrigat- ed cropland doubled. Today, despite important increases in farming pro- ductivity, 850 million people live in areas where adequate food supplies are at risk — two-thirds of them in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where the impact of climate change on food production is expected to be worst. 136

The productivity of irrigated crop- land has increased dramatically in the past half-century, according to the World Bank. The production of rice and wheat, for instance, increased 100 percent and 160 percent in that pe- riod, respectively, with no increase in water use per bushel. “However, in many (river) basins, water productiv- ity remains startlingly low,” the bank reports. Without greater agricultural productivity or major shifts in farm- ing locations, the amount of water needed for farming will jump 70 to 90 percent by 2050, according to the assessment. 137

As food requirements continue to rise, the increase in irrigation has slowed as underground water levels have begun to recede. Farmers also face growing competition for water from industry. 138

Rijsberman predicts the average price of water used in agriculture world- wide could increase by two to three times in the coming decades, inflating

global food prices. In addition, in- dustries and power producers can out- bid farmers for scarce water. If irri- gated harvests are cut back through a lack of water or because water is di- verted to industrial use, world grain prices will rise even more. 139

Policymakers still must resolve a major question about water pricing:

Should it be priced competitively, according to its value, like wheat, rice and other food commodities grown with water? A handful of gov- ernments have done just that: Chile allows landowners with water on or under their property to trade water rights to the highest bidders. Mexi- co, several Australian states and Cal-

Spraying vs. Dripping Due to evaporation, irrigation systems like this one in Lakefield Township, Mich. (top), waste up to 25 percent of the water they distribute. More expensive drip irrigation systems, like this one in Israel (bottom), lose only about 5 percent to evaporation but are used on less than 1 percent of irrigated lands worldwide.

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ifornia also have water-trading pro- grams. 140 In Texas, the flamboyant oil trader T. Boone Pickens has created a company, Mesa Water, to buy water from landowners above the Ogallala aquifer, to sell to water- short Texas cities. 141

But many experts think trading water as a commodity is a non-starter for most governments. “There is no move- ment in the real world, with elected officials,” says U.S. water-law expert Robert Glennon. “Water pricing is the third rail of water politics.”

Another option, supported by the World Bank and others, is trading “virtual” water. That occurs when a country with scarce water or poor agricultural land concentrates on de- veloping export goods to earn the money needed to import food from water-rich nations with productive, low-cost food producers. Such trades, which would require a low- ering of agricultural trade barriers, could bring down food production costs in water-poor countries and help reduce global water consumption, according to a World Bank report. Wheat grown in India, for example, consumes four times more water than wheat grown in France. By im- porting maize rather than growing it, Egypt reduces its national water con- sumption by 5 percent. 142

But importing “virtual” water also has a downside. “In Morocco, for ex- ample, one study showed that while the nation as a whole would benefit from agricultural trade liberalization, those benefits would be concentrated on the urban population; farmers — particularly poor farmers — stood to lose,” said a World Bank report. 143

For that reason, critics of expanded international trade oppose the “virtual” approach.

Other advocates call for greater reliance on rain-fed farming. Just over half of the world’s food, by value,

is produced using rainfall, but this sector — dominated by poor rural farmers — has traditionally been ig- nored by food producers and gov- ernments in favor of major irrigation strategies.

“Upgrading rain-fed areas has high potential both for food production and for poverty alleviation,” says the International Water Management In- stitute. Increasing small-scale rain- water storage with supplemental ir- rigation and better land management could produce quick output gains in these areas. 144

If farmers continue to depend on irrigation for 40 percent of their water, producing an acceptable diet for 2.4 billion more people in the next 30 years would require another 20 Nile Rivers or 97 Colorado Rivers, says water expert Postel. “It is not at all clear where this water is to come from.” 145

Notes

1 Charles C. Mann, “The Rise of Big Water,” Vanity Fair, May 2007; Reuters, “China drought threatens water supply for millions,” March 28, 2007. 2 Xinhua News Agency, “Drought leaves near- ly 250,000 short of drinking water in Guang- dong,” People’s Daily Online, Dec. 13, 2007; http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/632061 7.html. 3 Jonathan Watts, “Dry, Polluted, Plagued by Rats: The Crisis in China’s Greatest Yangtze River,” The Guardian (Britain), Jan. 17, 2008; http://chinaview.wordpress.com/category/en- vironment/drought/. 4 Xinhua News Agency, “Climate change blamed as drought hits 100,000 at China’s largest freshwater lake,” People’s Daily On- line, Dec. 14, 2007; http://english.people.com. cn/90001/90776/6321329.html. 5 Chris O’Brien, “Global Warming Hits China,” Forbes.com, Jan. 6, 2008; www.forbes.com/ opinions/2008/01/04/poyang-lake-china-oped- cx_cob_0106poyang.html.

6 Peter H. Gleick, “Time to Rethink Large In- ternational Water Meetings,” The World’s Water 2006-2007, Island Press, p. 182; www.world- water.org/. 7 David Molden, ed.; “Summary,” Water for Food, Water for Life: A Comprehensive Assess- ment of Water Management in Agriculture, In- ternational Water Management Institute, p. 10; www.iwmi.cgiar.org/assessment/files_new/syn- thesis/Summary_SynthesisBook.pdf. 8 See “Summary, Human Development Re- port 2006: Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis,” United Nations Development Programme, p. 26, http:// hdr.undp.org/en/media/hdr2006_english_sum- mary.pdf. 9 Carmen Revenga, et al., “Executive Sum- mary, Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems: Freshwater Systems,” World Resources Insti- tute, 2000, pp. 4, 26; www.wri.org/publica- tion/pilot-analysis-global-ecosystems-freshwater- systems. 10 Stacy Shelton, “Lake Lanier hits lowest point since its construction,” The Atlanta- Journal Constitution, Nov. 19, 2007; www. ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2007/11/ 19/lanierlowweb_1120.html?cxntlid=home- page_tab_newstab. For background, see Mary H. Cooper, “Water Shortages,” CQ Re- searcher, Aug. 1, 2003, pp. 649-672. 11 M. Falkenmark, et al., “On the Verge of a New Water Scarcity: A call for good gover- nance and human ingenuity,” Stockholm In- ternational Water Institute (SIWI) Policy Brief, 2007, p. 17. For background, see Colin Woodard, “Curbing Climate Change,” CQ Glob- al Researcher, February 2007, pp. 27-50. 12 “Water and Terrorism,” The World’s Water 2006-2007, op. cit., p. 1. 13 Environmental Protection Agency, “Water Sentinel Initiative,” www.epa.gov/watersecu- rity/pubs/water_sentinel_factsheet.pdf. 14 Met Office Hadley Centre, “Effects of cli- mate change in developing countries,” No- vember 2006, pp. 2-3, www.metoffice.gov.uk/re- search/hadleycentre/pubs/brochures/COP12.pdf; Michael McCarthy, “The Century of Drought,” The Independent (London), Oct. 4, 2006, p. 1. 15 McCarthy, ibid., p. 1. 16 World Water Council. 17 Quoted in “Billions without clean water,” March 14, 2000, BBC, http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/hi/676064.stm. 18 David Katz, “Going with the Flow,” The World’s Water 2006-2007, op. cit., pp. 30-39.

LOOMING WATER CRISIS

February 2008 51Available online: www.globalresearcher.com

19 Data Table 5, Access to Water Supply and Sanitation by Region, The World’s Water 2006-2007, op. cit., p. 258. 20 “Synthesis of the 4th World Water Forum,” August 2006, p. 23-24, www.world- waterforum4.org.mx/files/report/Synthesisof theForum.pdf. For background on Millennium Development Goals, see www.un.org/millenni- umgoals and “U.N. Fact Sheet on Water and Sanitation,” 2006, www.un.org/waterfor- lifedecade/factsheet.html. 21 “Human Development Report 2006,” op. cit., p. 8; http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/glob- al/hdr2006/. 22 Australian Broadcasting Corp., “Issues in Science and Technology,” transcript, Sept. 22, 2007. 23 Frank Rijsberman, Charlotte Fraiture and David Molden, “Water scarcity: the food fac- tor,” Issues in Science and Technology, June 22, 2007. 24 Ibid. 25 Sharon P. Nappier, Robert S. Lawrence, Kellogg J. Schwab, “Dangerous Waters,” Nat- ural History, November 2007, p. 48. 26 Marq de Villiers, Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource (1999), p. 267. 27 “World hit by water shortage,” Birming- ham Post, Aug. 21, 2006, p. 10; http://icbirm- ingham.icnetwork.co.uk/birminghampost/new s/tm_method=full%26objectid=17597105%26sit eid=50002-name_page.html. 28 “Water Resources Sector Strategy, Strategic Directions for World Bank Engagement,” World Bank, 2004, p. 5, www-wds.worldbank.org/ex- ternal/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/20 04/06/01/000090341_20040601150257/Rendered/ PDF/28114.pdf. 29 de Villiers, op. cit., pp. 176-177. 30 Frank R. Rijsberman, “1st Asia-Pacific Water Summit,” MaximsNews Network, Oct. 8, 2007; ww.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2006/ s1716766.htm. 31 Diane Raines Ward, Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly and the Politics of Thirst (2002), p. 171. 32 Nappier, et al., op. cit. 33 “Human Development Report,” op. cit., p. 176. Also see Meena Palaniappan, Emily Lee and Andrea Samulon, “Environmental Justice and Water,” The World’s Water 2006-2007, op. cit., p. 125. 34 “Human Development Report,” ibid. 35 Palaniappan, et al., op. cit.

36 Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, the Ameri- can West and its Disappearing Water (1986), p. 10. 37 Ibid., p. 437. 38 Ibid., pp. 10-11; also see Robin Clarke and Jannet King, The Water Atlas (2004). 39 “Approaches to Private Participation in Water Services,” World Bank, 2006, p. 213. 40 Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, Com- manding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (2004). 41 Juan Forero, “Multinational Is Ousted, but Local Ills Persist,” The New York Times, Dec. 15, 2005, p. 1; also, Public Citizen, “Water Privatization Case Study: Cochabamba, Bo- livia,” pp. 1-2, www.tradewatch.org/docu- ments/Bolivia_(PDF).PDF; and Bechtel Corp. statement, “Cochabamba and the Aquas del Tunari Consortium,” www.bechtel.com/as- sets/files/PDF/Cochabambafacts0305.pdf. 42 “European environment giant Veolia to increase investment in China to $2.5 billion by 2013,” Xinhua News Agency, Nov. 1, 2007. 43 Pinsent Masons Water Yearbook 2007-08, p. xii, www.pinsentmasons.com/media/1976 627452.pdf. 44 Quoted in Jeff Fleischer, “Blue Gold: An Interview with Maude Barlow,” Mother Jones, Jan. 14, 2005, www.motherjones.com/news/ qa/2005/01/maude_barlow.html. 45 “Economic Failures of Private Water Sys- tems,” Food & Water Watch, Dec. 2007, www.foodandwaterwatch.org/water/waterpri- vatization/usa/Public_vs_Private.pdf. 46 Scott Wallsten and Katrina Kosec, “Public or Private Drinking Water?” AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, March 2005, pp. 2, 7; www.reg-markets.org/publi- cations/abstract.php?pid=919. 47 Felipe Barrera-Osorio and Mauricio Oliv- era, “Does Society Win or Lose as a Result of Privatization?” Inter-American Development Bank, Research Network Working Paper #R- 525, March 2007, p. 19. 48 Ibid., p. 21. 49 Ward, op. cit., pp. 206-207. 50 Pinsent Masons Water Yearbook, op. cit., p. 3. 51 Ibid., p. 5. 52 Paul Constance, “The Day that Water Ran Uphill,” IDB America, Inter-American Devel- opment Bank, Dec. 9, 2007, www.iadb.org/id- bamerica/index.cfm?thisid=3909&lanid=1.

53 “Human Development Report,” op. cit., p. 92. 54 Ibid., p. 179; Ward, op. cit., p. 210. 55 Malcolm Scully, “The Politics of Running Out of Water,” The Chronicle of Higher Ed- ucation, Nov. 17, 2000. 56 Peter H. Gleick, “Environment and Security,” The World’s Water 2006-2007, op. cit., p. 189. 57 “Human Development Report,” op. cit., p. 221. 58 Benny Morris, Righteous Victims (2001), pp. 303-304. 59 Ward, op. cit., p. 174. 60 Ibid., p. 85. 61 Ibid., p. 192. 62 Undala Alam, letter to the Financial Times, April 1, 2006, p. 6. Also see www.trans- boundarywaters.orst.edu/publications/related_ research/Alam1998.pdf. 63 Gleick, “Environment and Security,” op. cit., p. 189. 64 Security and the Threat of Climate Change (2007), CNA Corp., p. 3; http://securityand- climate.cna.org/. 65 Ibid., p. 20. 66 Ibid., p. 22. 67 “Human Development Report,” op. cit., p. 216; Clarke and King, op. cit., p. 79. 68 Ibid., p. 47. 69 “Human Development Report,” op. cit., p. 218. 70 CNA, op. cit., p. 14. 71 “Dams and Development: A New Frame- work for Decision Making,” World Commis- sion on Dams, Nov. 16, 2000, p. 8; www.dams.org/report/wcd_overview.htm. 72 Xinhua News Agency, “China’s Grand Canal Queues for World Heritage Status,” July 6, 2004, www.china.org.cn/english/culture/100401.htm. 73 Terry S. Reynolds, Stronger Than a Hun- dred Men: A History of the Vertical Water Wheel (1932), pp. 32, 142. 74 Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (2004). 75 Revenga, et al., op. cit., p. 12. 76 World Commission on Dams, op. cit., p. 9. 77 Ibid., p. ii. 78 Ward, op. cit., p. 51. 79 Ibid., p. 46. 80 Lin Yang, “China’s Three Gorges’ Dam Under Fire,” Time, Oct. 12, 2007, www.time. com/time/world/article/0,8599,1671000,00.html. Also see Bruce Kennedy, “China’s Three

52 CQ Global Researcher

Gorges Dam,” CNN.com, 2001, www.cnn.com/ SPECIALS/1999/china.50/asian.superpower/three. gorges/. 81 Jonathan Watts, “Three Georges Dam risk to environment, says China,” The Guardian, Sept. 27, 2007. 82 Xinhua Financial News, “Chinese Govern- ment Fights Back in Defense of Three Gorges Dam,” Nov. 27, 2007; Jim Yardley, “China vigorously defends the Three Gorges Dam project,” The International Herald Tribune, Nov. 28, 2007, p. 3. 83 Revenga, et al., op. cit., p. 28. 84 “Synthesis of the 4th World Water Forum,” op. cit. 85 Ward, op. cit., p. 47. 86 Ibid., p. 187. 87 de Villiers, op. cit., p. 59. Also see “Is- lamic Water Management and the Dublin Statement,” The International Development Research Center, Canada, www.idrc.ca/en/ev- 93949-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html. 88 Katz, op. cit., p. 37. 89 Robert Glennon, Water Follies: Ground- water Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters (2002), p. 16. 90 Ibid., p. 14. 91 “Human Development Report,” op. cit., p. 185. 92 Ibid., p. 214. 93 Ward, op. cit., p. 188. 94 Sandra Postel and Brian Richter, Rivers for Life, Managing Water for People and Nature (2003), p. 168. 95 “Human Development Report,” op. cit., p. 103. 96 Ibid., p. 37. 97 Ibid., p. 42. 98 Ibid., pp. 45-46. 99 Ibid., p. 33. 100 Ibid., p. 29.

101 Ibid., p. 30, citing Frances Bell and Robert Millward, “Public Health Expenditures and Mortality in England and Wales, 1870-1914,” pp. 221-249. 102 Palaniappan, et al., op. cit., p. 131, citing the World Water Council, “Financing Water for All,” Global Water Partnership, March 2004. 103 Ibid., p. 139. 104 de Villiers, op. cit., p 171. 105 Ibid., pp. 172-177. 106 Ibid., p. 174; “Human Development Report,” op. cit., p. 219; “Future Danube Flood Actions Depend On International Cooperation,” Com- mission for the Protection of the Danube, April 2 1 , 2 0 0 6 ; w w w . i c p d r . o r g / i c p d r - pages/pr20060421_danube_flood.htm. For back- ground, see Brian Beary, “The New Europe,” CQ Global Researcher, August, 2007. 107 Peter H. Gleick, Heather Cooley, Gary Wolff, “With a Grain of Salt: An Update on Seawater Desalination,” The World’s Water 2006-2007, op. cit., p. 55. 108 Ibid., pp. 68-70. 109 Ibid., pp. 78-79. 110 Ibid., p. 161. General Electric Co. pro- jects an annual growth rate of 9 to 14 per- cent, growing from $4.3 billion in annual desalination expenditures in 2005 to $14 bil- lion in 2014. 111 P. W. Mote, et al., “Declining Mountain Snowpack in Western North America,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 86, January 2005, pp. 49-48. 112 “New Century of Thirst for World’s Moun- tains,” Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, May 18, 2006, www.pnl.gov/news/release.asp?id=158. 113 Eric Bontrager, “West will need to revisit water, land management in light of global warm- ing, experts say,” Land Letter, Sept. 28. 2006; www.eenews.net/ll/ (subscription required).

114 Shaun McKinnon, “Southwest Could Be- come Dust Bowl, Study Warns,” The Arizona Republic, April 6, 2007, p. 1; www.azcen- tral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0406cli- mate-report0406.html. 115 Bontrager, op. cit. 116 Ibid. 117 Shaun McKinnon, “Snow runoff: What’s at Stake,” The Arizona Republic, Nov. 25, 2007, p. 8; and Stephen Saunders and Mau- reen Maxwell, “Less Snow, Less Water: Cli- mate Disruption in the West,” The Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, September 2005, pp. 2, 9, 19, www.rockymountaincli- mate.org/website%20pictures/Less%20Snow%2 0Less%20Water.pdf. 118 “UK Government: Global drought in the 21st century,” M2 Presswire, Oct. 26, 2006; www.continuitycentral.com/news02870.htm. 119 “Fourth Assessment Report — Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, Summary for Policy- makers,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Nov. 17, 2007, p. 8; www.ipcc.ch/pdf/as- sessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf. 120 Claudie Tebaldi, Katharine Hayhoe, Julie M. Arblaster and Gerald A. Meehle, “Going to Ex- tremes,” Institute for the Study of Society and Environment, National Center for Atmospheric Research, 2006, p. 22; www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/pub- lications/tebaldi_extremes.pdf. 121 Jon Gertner, “The Future is Drying Up,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 21, 2007; www.ny- times.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21water-t.html? _r=1&oref=slogin. 122 “New Study Shows Climate Change Likely to Lead to Periods of Extreme Drought in South- west North America,” Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, April 6, 2007, www.ldeo.colum- bia.edu/news-events/new-study-shows-climate- change-likely-lead-periods-extreme-drought- southwest-north-ameri. 123 “A Review of Water Conservation Plan- ning for the Atlanta, Georgia Region, August 2006, prepared for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection,” Pacific Institute, p. 23, www.pacinst.org/reports/atlanta/at- lanta_analysis.pdf. 124 “Report to the Secretaries of State for Com- munities and Local Government and Food and Rural Affairs,” The Planning Inspectorate, Sept. 29, 2006, p. 7-8, www.communities.gov.uk/doc- uments/planningandbuilding/pdf/319931, and www.thameswater.co.uk/UK/region/en_gb/

LOOMING WATER CRISIS

About the Author Washington freelancer writer Peter Behr worked for more than 25 years at The Washington Post, where he reported on energy issues and served as business editor. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, Behr worked at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars and is now writing a book about the U.S. electric power grid. His report on “Energy Nationalism” appeared in the July 2007 issue.

February 2008 53Available online: www.globalresearcher.com

content/News/News_001394.jsp?SECT=Section _Homepage_000431. 125 Amy L. Vickers, “The Future of Water Con- servation: Challenges Ahead,” The Universities Council on Water Resources (UCOWR), p. 52, www.ucowr.siu.edu/updates/pdf/V114_A8.pdf. Also see Marcia Clemmitt, “Aging Infrastructure,” CQ Researcher, Sept. 28, 2007, pp. 793-816. 126 Clarke and King, op. cit., p. 87. 127 “Re-engaging in Agricultural Water Man- agement — Challenges and Options,” The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank, 2006, p. 3, web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOP- ICS/EXTARD/0,,contentMDK:20858509~pageP K:210058~piPK:210062~theSitePK:336682,00. html. 128 Vickers, op. cit., p. 52. 129 Harriet Emerson and Mohamed Lahlou, “Conservation: It’s the Future of Water,” Na- tional Drinking Water Clearinghouse, www.nesc.wvu.edu/ndwc/ndwc_conservarti- clesetc.htm/harrietarticle.html. 130 “Fact Sheet,” U.S. Green Building Council, www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CMSPageID= 222. 131 Katz, op. cit., p. 32. 132 Postel and Richter, op. cit., p. 201. 133 “World Population Prospects,” U.N. De- partment of Economic and Social Affairs, 2006, http://esa.un.org/unpp/. 134 Molden, op. cit., p. 1; Birmingham Post, op. cit., p. 10. 135 Quoted in Kerry O’Brien, “Water scarcity ‘due to agriculture,’ ” Australian Broadcast- ing Corp. Transcripts, Aug. 16, 2006; www.abc. net.au/7.30/content/2006/s1716766.htm. 136 Molden, op. cit., pp. 7-8. 137 Ibid., p. 14. 138 “Re-engaging in Agricultural Water Manage- ment,” op. cit., p. 38. 139 Rijsberman, op. cit. 140 Postel and Richter, op. cit., pp. 112-117. 141 Jim Getz, “Kaufman County won’t vote on Pickens’ freshwater district: But Roberts County calls election on Pickens’ pitch for freshwater district,” The Dallas Morning News, Sept. 5, 2007. 142 “Re-engaging in Agricultural Water Manage- ment,” op. cit., p. 102. 143 Ibid., p 103. 144 International Water Management Institute, op. cit., p. 10. 145 de Villiers, op. cit., p 24.

FOR MORE INFORMATION The CNA Corp., 4825 Mark Center Drive, Alexandria, VA 22311; (703) 824-2000; www.cna.org. A nonprofit research organization that operates the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research, concentrating on security, defense and other government-policy issues.

Food and Water Watch, 1616 P St., N.W., Suite 300, Washington, DC 20036; (202) 683-2500; www.foodandwaterwatch.org. A liberal research and advocacy organization focused on water resources, food security, sanitation and globalization issues.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, C/O World Meteorological Or- ganization, 7bis Avenue de la Paix, C.P. 2300, CH-1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland; 41-22-730-8208/84; www.ipcc.ch. Intergovernmental research body.

International Water Management Institute, 127, Sunil Mawatha, Pelawatte, Battaramulla, Colombo, Sri Lanka; 94-11 2880000, 2784080; www.iwmi.cgiar.org. Research group supported by 60 governments, private foundations and interna- tional organizations.

The Met Office Hadley Centre, Met Office, FitzRoy Road, Exeter, Devon, EX1 3PB, United Kingdom; 44 (0)1392 885680; www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadley- centre. Britain’s official center for climate-change research.

Pacific Institute, 654 13th St., Preservation Park, Oakland, CA 94612; (510) 251-1600; www.pacinst.org. A nonpartisan think tank studying development, environment and security issues.

Property and Environment Research Center, 2048 Analysis Dr., Suite A, Bozeman, MT 59718; (406) 587-9591; www.perc.org. A pro-market research and advocacy group.

Public Citizen, 1600 20th St., N.W., Washington, DC 20009; (202) 588-1000; www.citizen.org. A liberal consumer-advocacy group.

Stockholm International Water Institute, Drottninggatan 33, SE — 111 51 Stockholm, Sweden; 46 8 522 139 60; www.siwi.org. A research organization affiliated with the Swedish government.

U.N. Human Development Office, 304 E. 45th St., 12th Floor, New York, NY 10017; (212) 906-3661; hdr.undp.org/en/humandev. Publishes an annual report on health, economic and other social conditions.

U.S. Geological Survey, 12201 Sunrise Valley Dr., Reston, VA 20192; (888) 275- 8747; www.usgs.gov. The government’s mapping agency and research center on water resources, geology, natural hazards and other physical sciences.

World Bank, 1818 H St., N.W., Washington, DC 20433; (202) 473-1000; www.world- bank.org. Provides technical and financial assistance to developing countries.

World Water Council, Espace Gaymard, 2-4 place d’Arvieux, 13002 Marseille, France; 33 491 994100; www.worldwatercouncil.org. An international research and advocacy group of government and international agency officials, academics and corporate executives; sponsors World Water Forum every three years.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

54 CQ Global Researcher

Books

Clarke, Robin, and Jannet King, The Water Atlas, The New Press, 2004. Editors at the World Meteorological Organization present a

visual primer on water scarcity, sanitation shortfalls and climate impact on water resources.

de Villiers, Marq, Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource, Stoddard Publishing Co., 1999. A Canadian journalist provides a global overview of challenges

confronting the world’s water supplies.

Glennon, Robert, Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters, Island Press, 2002. An attorney and water-policy expert advocates new policies

to preserve Western U.S. aquifers.

Olivera, Oscar, Cochabamba! Water Rebellion in Bolivia, South End Press, 2004. The leader of the Bolivian protest against water privatization

gives his side of the conflict.

Postel, Sandra, and Brian Richter, Rivers for Life, Man- aging Water for People and Nature, Island Press, 2003. Experts at the Global Water Policy Project in Massachusetts

(Postel) and The Nature Conservancy (Richter) chronicle the cam- paign to restore environmental conditions in threatened rivers.

Reisner, Marc, Cadillac Desert, the American West and Its Disappearing Water, Penguin Books, 1986. This award-winning classic by a former Natural Resources

Defense Council expert critiques federal land and irrigation policies and their impact on water use in the West.

Ward, Diane Raines, Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly and the Politics of Thirst, Riverhead Books, 2002. An environmental writer reviews controversial global policies

affecting dams, water treaties and other water-resource issues.

Articles

Mann, Charles C., “The Rise of Big Water,” Vanity Fair, May 2007. A correspondent for Science and The Atlantic Monthly ex-

plores the controversy over privatization programs for water and sanitation worldwide.

Reports and Studies

“Approaches to Private Participation in Water Services: A Tool Kit,” The World Bank, 2006, http://publications.world-

bank.org/ecommerce/catalog/product?item_id=4085442. The world’s major foreign-aid lender provides lessons learned

from water-privatization efforts.

“Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis,” United Nations Development Programme, U.N. Human Development Report 2006, http://hdr.undp. org/en/reports/global/hdr2006. This detailed review of worldwide water and sanitation

challenges includes case studies of successes and failures.

“Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture: Water for Food, Water for Life,” International Water Management Institute, 2006, www.fao.org/nr/water/ docs/Summary_SynthesisBook.pdf. A consulting group based in Sri Lanka reports on the impact

of water scarcity on global irrigation and food production.

“Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision Making,” World Commission on Dams, 2000, www.dams. org/report. Water experts, educators and government officials assess

issues surrounding major dam construction and operations.

“IPCC Fourth Assessment Report,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007, www.ipcc.ch/ipccre- ports/ar4-syr.htm. A scientific panel sponsored by the World Meteorological

Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme issues its most recent outlook on climate change threats.

“National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” CNA Corp., December 2007, http://securityandclimate.cna.org/re- port/. A panel of retired U.S. generals and admirals forecasts security

issues that will emerge as a result of climate change.

“Synthesis of the 4th World Water Forum, Mexico City,” World Water Council, 2006, www.worldwatercouncil. org/index.php?id=1386. An international committee presents a summary of its fourth

conference on water-resources issues.

Gleick, Peter H., et al., “The World’s Water 2006-2007, The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources,” The Pacific In- stitute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Secu- rity, 2006, www.pacinst.org/publications/worlds_water/2006- 2007/index.htm. The institute’s latest review of global water-resource issues

includes chronologies of water conflicts and analyses of strategies for sustainable freshwater resource management.

Selected Sources

Bibliography

February 2008 55Available online: www.globalresearcher.com

Conflicts

“Climate Change Will Cause New Wars — UN,” Canberra Times, June 22, 2007. Changing patterns of rainfall and fights over food produc-

tion could lead to potential conflicts in Africa’s Sahel region and in East Asia, according to U.N. Environment Programme Executive Director Achim Steiner.

“Managing the Water Wars of the Future,” Indian Express, May 12, 2007. Overcoming the environmental and political difficulties of water

scarcity will help manage the conflicts stemming from a lack of access to clean and safe water.

“Water is Running Out: How Inevitable Are International Conflicts?” Integrated Regional Information Networks (United Nations), Oct. 23, 2006. Water resources are decreasing amid a growing world pop-

ulation and increasing water consumption, making water- related conflicts inevitable.

Baldauf, Scott, “Climate Change Escalates Darfur Crisis,” The Christian Science Monitor, July 27, 2007, p. 1. Competition for water in Sudan’s Darfur region has long

sparked conflict in the area, and is one of the main causes of the current fighting.

Moving Water

“Bangladesh, India to Hold Talks on Sharing River Water,” PTI News Agency (India), July 20, 2007. India and Bangladesh are expected to discuss water-sharing

and diversion issues involving eight major trans-boundary rivers.

“China, Spain Vow to Strengthen Water Resources Utiliza- tion Cooperation,” Xinhua News Agency (China), Oct. 14, 2007. Chinese Vice Premier Hui Liangyu has promised to strengthen

bilateral cooperation with Spain over water resources.

Jones, Tim, “Great Lakes Key Front in Water Wars,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 28, 2007, p. A1. Eight Great Lakes-area states and two Canadian provinces

have proposed a regional water compact that would prevent water diversions from the immediate region.

Privatization

Mitra, Barun, “Water Scarcity in Plenty,” Business Day (South Africa), March 23, 2006. Government intervention has contributed significantly to

water scarcity, while private initiatives have sustained local markets and improved access for millions.

Sasa, Mabasa, “Privatisation of Water Not the Answer,” The Herald (Zimbabwe), Dec. 29, 2007. Privatizing water supplies will mean corporations report to

the World Bank rather than to state governments.

Seno, Alexandra A., “Very Liquid Assets,” Newsweek, Aug. 20, 2007. Savvy asset-management companies have turned concerns over

water shortage into burgeoning investment-fund businesses.

Wallach, Jason, “Privatizing Water and the Criminalization of Protest,” NACLA News (New York), July 24, 2007. Despite corruption in El Salvador’s government, citizens want the

water system to be under state control rather than in private hands.

Water Supply

Doyle, Alister, “Increasing Agricultural Use a Drain on World Water Supply,” The Washington Post, Aug. 21, 2006, p. A2. Rising demand for irrigation in the production of food and

biofuels will likely aggravate water scarcity.

Fan, Grace, “Abundant Water Makes Brazil Last Agriculture Frontier, as Scarcity Looms in Rest of World,” The As- sociated Press, Aug. 24, 2006. Abundant freshwater will help Brazil dominate global food

supplies for the next several decades while water scarcity threatens the economies of other countries.

Girma, Biruk, “Poverty, Not Scarcity, to Blame for Lack of Water, Poor Sanitation — Report,” Daily Monitor (Ethiopia), Nov. 14, 2006. Millions of people lack access to safe water and sanitation

due to inequality and poverty, according to the U.N.

The Next Step: Additional Articles from Current Periodicals

CITING CQ GLOBAL RESEARCHER Sample formats for citing these reports in a bibliography

include the ones listed below. Preferred styles and formats

vary, so please check with your instructor or professor.

MLA STYLE Flamini, Roland. “Nuclear Proliferation.” CQ Global Re-

searcher 1 Apr. 2007: 1-24.

APA STYLE Flamini, R. (2007, April 1). Nuclear proliferation. CQ Global

Researcher, 1, 1-24.

CHICAGO STYLE Flamini, Roland. “Nuclear Proliferation.” CQ Global Re-

searcher, April 1, 2007, 1-24.

Voices From Abroad:

LOIC FAUCHON President,

World Water Council

Privatization con- tributes to exodus

“A lot of poor people are leaving their countries to go to rich countries. Isn’t it prefer- able, isn’t it cheaper, to pay so that these people have water, sewage [treatment] and energy . . . [so they can] stay in their own countries?”

The Associated Press, March 2006

FADEL KAWASH Head, Palestinian Water Authority

Justice provides water to all

“In the Middle East, water is a political issue. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank . . . presents a major obsta- cle to development projects especially in the water sec- tor. There is enough water in the West Bank if there is justice and sharing.”

Agence France-Presse, March 2006

BAN KI-MOON Secretary General,

United Nations

Water is crucial to all problems

“Safe drinking water and adequate sanitation are cru- cial for poverty reduction, cru- cial for sustainable develop- ment, and crucial for achieving any and every one of the Mil- lennium Development Goals.”

Speech at opening of U.N. water exhibit, New York, October 2007

KRISTA HANSON Program Director, Com- mittee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador

Privatization increases rates

“If we take the electrici- ty sector and telecommuni- cations as guides, privatiza- tion has meant higher rates, lower quality, less access and less sovereign control over public services.”

NACLA News (New York), July 2007

ABEL MAMANI Minister of Water, Bolivia

Water: an inalienable right

“Access to fresh drinking water for everyone, in all our countries, is a fundamental right. For us, water is life. Es- tablishing a right to water, therefore is another way of recognising the right to life already enshrined by the United Nations. Recognise water as a human right!”

World Water Assembly, Brussels, March 2007

CAROLINE SAINT-MLEUX Head, Care International,

Iriba, Chad

Water can help Darfur “You have to have the war-

ring parties talk about a com- mon need, and after that you might have them talk about something else that would start giving other solutions to the conflict.”

The Christian Science Monitor, July 2007

MUHAMMAD SAEED AL-KINDI

Minister of Environment and Water, United Arab

Emirates

Droughts are shifting the focus

“The concern has recently taken a greater importance with the increased frequency and prolonged periods of drought being experienced worldwide. Consequently, this century will see a greater emphasis being placed on desalinated water and the re-use of treated water, and the extent to which these important resources will contribute to the overall sup- ply of water globally.”

Agence France-Presse, April 2007

PRINCE WILLEM- ALEXANDER OF THE

NETHERLANDS Chairman, U.N. Advisory

Board on Water and Sanitation

Proper sanitation im- proves dignity

“Clean water and sanita-

tion are not only about hy- giene and disease, they’re about dignity, too. Reliev- ing yourself in hazardous places means risking every- thing from urological dis- ease to harassment and rape. Many examples show that self-esteem begins with having a safe and proper toilet facility.”

Speech at U.N. International Year of Sanitation global launch, November 2007

FRANK RIJSBERMAN Director General,

International Water Management Institute

Old models won’t work “The last 50 years of water

management practices are no model for the future when it comes to dealing with water scarcity. We need radical change in the institutions and organizations responsible for managing our earth’s water supplies and a vastly different way of thinking about water man- agement.”

The Associated Press, August 2006

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