Time of want

By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed

On 7-8 October, the International Desalination Association (IDA) held its second international conference in Cairo, which, in addition to international experts in the field, was attended by Egypt's ministers of agriculture, industry, electricity, works and housing. From 15-19 October, a number of prominent writers and publishers gathered in Beirut to launch an intercultural editorial project on the theme of "Water in Tradition and Modernity." On 12-13 October, the Centre for the Global South held a conference in Washington under the title "Water: Dispute Prevention and Development." I received invitations to three conferences but because of their concomitance decided to attend the Washington conference organised and chaired by my good friend Dr Clovis Maksoud.

At the opening session, the vice-president of the World Bank, Dr Ismail Serageddin, painted a stark picture of the water situation: of all the water available on earth, 97.5 per cent is salt water against only 2.5 per cent sweet water from rain, rivers, lakes and underground water. More than half of this meager 2.5 per cent is concentrated at the two poles, and the water actually available to sustain all forms of life on earth is less than 1 per cent, more precisely, 5,000 cubic kilometres. Despite the glaring disparity between salt and sweet water and the growing need for the latter, very little is being done to change the ratio to the advantage of sweet water. Man is looking for water on the surface of the moon, even on the surface of Mars. Water is now believed to exist in abundance in a host of celestial bodies. But very little is being done to find a way of desalinating sea water economically.

The Washington conference addressed a number of pressing questions. Is water scarcity at the global level real or contrived? Does it affect only certain parts of the world and not others? Unlike electricity, water is difficult to displace from one place to another. Are we then facing a crisis of distribution of water rather than a growing shortage of water? This summer, so much rain fell in parts of China that the rivers burst their banks, flooding an area of the country larger than France, while other parts of China experienced severe drought. And if we are facing real water shortage, is it a permanent crisis or a transient phenomenon? Is it natural or man-made, a side-effect of modern technology that impacts adversely on the environment, like global warming for example?

There are no clear-cut answers to these questions, though finding answers can be crucial for the future of the human race. While desalination of sea water is still very expensive compared to other means of increasing the supply of potable water, such as rationalising its use and combatting waste, it does not follow that man should bow to the inevitability of growing water scarcity. Here we come up against the cardinal question of whether man should accept the objective limitations imposed by nature or try to bend nature to his requirements. Should all the funds allocated to overcoming water scarcity be devoted to rationalising the use of existing water resources, or should part be directed at promoting new sources of water?

It could be argued that investing in a research area without any guarantee of success is a waste of time and energy. The fallacy of such an argument can best be demonstrated by the amount of funds now being poured into the search for a cure for AIDS, with no guarantee that a cure will ever be found.

What sets the growing scarcity of fresh water apart from the shortage of unpolluted air and land fit for human use is that water is actually plentiful. What is scarce is not water per se but water that has been separated from salt. It is easy enough to retain the salt removed from water but not vice-versa.

Still, this does not mean that we need worry only about scarcity of potable water; there is also a growing shortage of unpolluted air and land. In fact, pollution is placing our whole ecosystem at risk, contaminating the very air we breathe and the earth from which we draw our sustenance. An unfortunate feature of modern technology is that advances in the field are often accompanied by unexpected side-effects that can sometimes be so negative as to overshadow, if not cancel out altogether, the pre-planned positive effects of a technological breakthrough. Given the unpredictability of its potentially disastrous side-effects, modern technology could in the final analysis be more harmful than beneficial to our well-being. Nowhere is this more evident than in the growing scarcity of drinkable water, breathable air and cultivatable land. The risk this poses to the survival of the human race makes intervention by man and the constant updating, reconsideration and correction of plans drawn for the future, in the light of new data and new experiences and on the basis of constant testing, absolutely imperative.

One school of thought believes that the problem can best be solved by being left to the market laws of supply and demand. To my mind, allowing our survival to be determined by laws that are 'blind' and concerned primarily with instant gratification would be sheer folly. A more hands-on approach is called for, including questioning the assertion that wide scale desalination of sea water should not be attempted because it is not, for the time being, an economically viable option. For what could be costly and demanding in the short term can yield enormous dividends in the longer term. Here the human/social dimension should be given priority over market mechanisms. This principle was touched upon in my last two articles on the re-emergence of Social-Democracy in global politics. It applies just as well to the problem of growing scarcity.

It will be the , in whose name Dr Maksoud's Centre speaks, that will suffer most from scarcity. In a market economy, whatever is scarce has a price. To bow to the inevitability of scarcity is to accept the eventual commodification of resources that are vital for humankind's survival. If a price is placed on air, water, land, etc. the South will become even more dependent on 'grants' from the North, even if what is in effect charity is disguised as 'responding to the social dimension'! If the principle of pricing water is established, a question worth asking is how Egyptians would react to a deal struck between Israel and one of the African countries through which the Nile passes, whereby Israel would buy parts of that country's share of Nile water and then request Egypt to deliver that water to Israel. The subterfuge of pricing water will have been used to compel Egypt to do what it has hitherto categorically refused to do: give Israel part of its vital Nile water!