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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 April 1999 Issue No. 425 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 April 1999 Issue No. 425
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The water bomb
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
Of the many books and articles published in conjunction with the celebrations held on 22 March to mark Water Day, two stand out for their insightful approach to the problem of growing water scarcity and its implications for the new millennium: Dr Mahmoud Abu Zeid's Water, a Subject of Tension in the 21st Century and Ricardo Petrella's Water Manifesto: For a Global Contract. Dr Abu Zeid is not only Egypt's minister of works and water resources, but is also an internationally renowned expert on water issues. He is president of the World Water Council, of UNESCO's Water Programme and of the International Institute of Water Resources. Dr Petrella is a professor of political and social sciences specialised in political economy. His Manifesto is a collective effort undertaken by the Mario Soares Foundation in Lisbon.
The Manifesto predicts that three issues will occupy the forefront of the world's political concerns in the first two decades of the next century: first, globalism and world finance, second, the Information Revolution on which I touched in my last article, and third, the issue of global water shortage.
The trend towards globalisation, characterised by the intermeshing and interdependence of world finance, by new limitations on state sovereignty and by the growing role of globalised institutions and multinational corporations in the political arena, is bound to introduce dramatic changes to the entire world system. Some of these changes are already upon us: today, the most prominent figures on the world scene are not industrialists like the Rockefellers, the Fords, the Thyssens or the Solvays, not railway or oil barons, but such household names of the information age as Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and IBM, and financial institutions like Morgan, Goldman-Sachs and Fidelity. And, if present trends on water continue, the Manifesto expects giant water enterprises like Suez-Lyonnaise, Vivendi, Saur-Bouygues, Nestlé, Bechtel and Danon to move centre stage.
We all know how important financial and information institutions are in shaping the world of tomorrow, but what is extraordinary is the sudden prominence of organisations dealing with water. The exponentially growing water problem has been described as a "water bomb" to drive home the point that lack of water is a ticking time-bomb that could blow up in our faces in the not too distant future. The world population is expected to reach 8 billion in 2020. Already 1.4 billion people, that is, 50 times the population of the United States, are deprived of drinking water. By 2025, this figure is expected to rise to 4 billion, i.e., half of humanity! The Middle East, with its vast deserts marked by water scarcity, will be particularly had hit by the water crisis.
Both writers concentrate more on the need to rationalise the use of already available water and to combat waste than on creating new sources of water by such methods as desalinating sea water, which constitutes 97.5 per cent of all the water on the surface of the planet. Though in the context of available technologies the cost of such an enterprise is prohibitive, Dr Abu Zeid admits that the ideal solution in the long run is to desalinate sea water with its inexhaustible potentialities.
His view is not shared by Dr Petrella, who devotes only one short paragraph to the issue of desalination, which he believes is not promising on a wide scale in the foreseeable future. According to his assessment of the situation, two serious obstacles stand in the way of giant desalination projects capable of meeting the requirements of the 1.4 billion people currently deprived of decent drinking water: first, they need enormous quantities of energy that would increase carbon dioxide emissions and critically contribute to global warming, second, they could become a source of wide scale marine pollution due to the discharge in the high seas of used residual waters at very high temperatures. Petrella acknowledges, however, that results have been achieved experimentally in bringing down the cost of desalination from $1.5 to 60 cents per cubic metre, thanks to the joint efforts of the Metropolitan Water District of South California's Huntington Beach factory and Israel's Technion Institute of Technology.
The Israelis are deliberately downplaying the importance of their achievements in this field. Last December, news agencies reported an ambitious Israeli plan to construct a desalination plant with the capacity to desalinate 50 million cubic metres of sea water annually in Rafah, on the border between Egypt and Gaza, which will take some ten years to complete at a cost running into many billions of dollars. According to the Italian news agency, Ansa, the United States is available to contribute towards financing the project, probably together with the European Union and Japan. The project is only part of a wider project involving the construction of four desalination plants in Israel itself, based on new technologies. Completion of the entire project is scheduled for 2010, in time to offset the water shortages expected to affect not only Israel but also the self-rule territories and Jordan in the near future, thus giving Israel an enormous edge over the Arab states and raising the spectre of new alliances and types of wars provoked by scarcity of water, not only of land.
Unless the Arabs come up with a workable project of their own, they may well find themselves forced to rely on Turkey's 'aqueduct for peace', a project they turned down in 1986. According to Dr Abu Zeid, the Turkish project is based on the idea of diverting the waters of two rivers, the Geyhan and the Seyan, originating from the melting of the ice on the Anatolian plateau in summer, to flow through Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the Emirates at a cost of some 19 billion dollars. At the time, the Arab oil states preferred to desalinate sea water at exorbitant prices than to depend for their drinking water on Turkey. This is becoming a heavy burden with the slump in oil prices, but an outlay of 19 billion dollars from their dwindling oil coffers does not seem any more affordable.
To my mind, the most important point made by Petrella's Manifesto is the growing polarisation between two schools of thought on the issue of water. One is informed by the present globalist world order and regards water like any other commodity on the global market, that is, as subject to the market laws of supply and demand. Thus, as it becomes more scarce, its value -- and price -- will increase. In this logic, as long as technology has not reached the point of making desalination cheap, it will not be an option and rationalisation of available water is the only solution.
The other school of thought regards water as part of the common weal, a necessity for the survival of the human species on this planet and believes that making funds available for the creation of new types of potable water should not be subjected to the rules of the market. Presently, investments worth $600 billion are needed to overcome the problems of water shortage. Only $60 billion are available. Should humanity perish because the markets are unable to provide that sum?
