The world could be in troubled waters
Now, 65 per cent of the world’s fresh water flows into industrialised agriculture.
In 1995, World Bank vice president Ismail Serageldin predicted an acute water shortage for the new millennium: “If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.” Among the 300 potential armed conflicts on water sharing around the world that have been identified, it is only a matter of time that a few of them develop into armed confrontation.
All the major rivers of the world are already under pressure to provide water for farming and industry as well as drinking water for the 3-billion extra people expected to be born before the world’s population starts to drop. By 2025, says the UN, nearly one in three people will live in countries that are affected by water shortages. In short, water shortage would affect the livelihood of one-third of the world’s population. According to an estimate by the UN by 2015, at least 40 per cent of the world’s population will lack an adequate water supply.
The bickering over Teesta water-sharing between India and Bangladesh might well be ‘amicably’ solved. But serious potential conflicts around the world where upstream countries can withhold water from arid downstream countries that need or want it exist. India and Pakistan constantly bicker over the Indus. China, Nepal, India and Bangladesh all squabble over the rivers rising in the Himalayas and which flow through neighbouring countries, providing water for nearly 500 million people on the way.
Acrimonious issue
The Brahmaputra flows through some of the most heavily disputed and unstable areas in South Asia. China and India currently dispute 83,000 km within the basin. Water is fast becoming an acrimonious issue in Asian countries, where per capita freshwater availability is less than half the global average. Iraq has problems with Turkey controlling the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates with large dams.
While the world’s population has tripled, water demand has sextupled. Now 65 per cent of the world’s fresh water flows into industrialised agriculture, which cannot survive without huge irrigation projects. Now when government planners and developers build big dams to be able to supply water for massive irrigation, they wreak an ecological havoc. While the Green Revolution increased food production it caused depleted aquifers, saline soil, and chemical pollution. In fact, pollution has so diminished the world's fresh water resources that less than one percent of it can be used for drinking or agriculture. So, where will the water crunch hurt the most? Food supplies surely, as agriculture is the world’s biggest user of water. As per an estimate it takes at least 2,000 litres to produce enough food for one person for one day that translates into 7,30,000 litres annually per person.
What are the social costs? People living in the Ganges-Brahmaputra river basin outnumber the combined population of Western Europe and the entire North American continent. Environmentalists cite that China’s dam construction has displaced whole populations and created severe ecological imbalances. China being an upper riparian state, for instance, has the wherewithal — being the source of cross-border river flows to the largest number of countries in the world — from Russia to India, Kazakhstan to the Indochina peninsula — to divert water causing irreparable destruction of a large part of the North-East and Bangladesh that might trigger a massive movement of millions of refugees from Bangladesh into India for their livelihood. The issue demands an urgent trilateral solution.
The former Soviet Union's vast irrigation plan to feed water-intensive crops in Central Asia has turned the Aral Sea, one of the largest inland bodies of water, into a shrunken, salty puddle. Already, water is being used unsustainably that is, using tomorrow’s water for today’s food demands so much so that in India groundwater resources are fast drying up, while China, which has 20 percent of the world’s population but only 8 percent of its renewable fresh water, faces falling water tables, trying hard to balance its agricultural and industrial needs. There is an increasing prospect that globally, less water will be available for food production in the years ahead.
The solution, at hand, is to establish fair water-sharing principles. As more and more countries are committing to ratify the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention, China, among our neighbours, is one of only three countries that voted against the 1997 UN convention laying down rules on the shared resources of international watercourses. The 1999 Nile Basin Initiative, a multilateral agreement among nine nations, including Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan, as a prime example of countries opting to cooperate rather than compete over access to water. Water crisis seems to be a looming threat to millions and without a collective, multilateral approach a bleak future awaits us all.
