12 - 18 April 2001
Issue No.529
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 April 2001 Issue No.529 |
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The water refugees
Humanity is threatened with a new scourge: water scarcity. Mohamed Sid-Ahmed argues that this could become a key element in future relations between Arabs and Israelis
Although water covers nearly two thirds of the surface of the planet, water shortage has been identified as one of the two most worrying problems for the new millennium, the other being global warming. According to a report put out by the World Resources Institute (WRI) on the occasion of World Water Day, which was celebrated this year on 22 March, more than half of the world's 6.5 billion people are expected to suffer from water shortages by 2025. Already more than a billion people in the world do not have access to safe water, and the growing water crisis is not only becoming a major source of friction between nations but is expected to give rise to a new phenomenon as millions of people in developing countries are forced to migrate in search of clean water. These water refugees are likely to fare no better than the economic and political refugees who, in face of legislation limiting their access to developed societies, resort to illegal means of entry with often disastrous consequences.
Demand for water, which is a finite resource, is fast outstripping supply. For a variety of reasons (mismanagement of water resources, population increase, inefficient and wasteful use of water in irrigation), global consumption of water increased six-fold between 1990 and 1995. World Water Day focused attention on the global water deficit and on the regions of the world most affected by water shortages. Among the alarming statistics included in the WRI report is that in the 20th century the rate of water consumption worldwide rose by more than double the rate of population growth, while the diminishing amount of available water is threatening to raise the price of food beyond the means of over a billion human beings. Developed societies will be able to overcome water shortage by rationalising water consumption, but this will not apply to poorer countries.
The WRI report coincided with the report put out by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which estimates that one person in five across the world has no access to safe drinking water, one in two lacks safe sanitation and 3.2 million people die every year from water-related diseases. The report also warns that as global demand for diminishing supplies of water increases, the potential for conflict grows in different corners of the world, and identifies 300 possible flashpoints. The situation is not helped by the fact that two-thirds of the big rivers and lakes in the world are shared by more than one state.
Moreover, sweet water is distributed unequally worldwide. Thirty-four lucky countries (Brazil, Canada, Columbia, the US, India, Indonesia, Russia, the European Union) share two-thirds of potable water resources. According to the UNEP report, over-exploitation of rivers and underground water, pollution, waste, population growth and the erratic development of cities are all factors that have contributed to the present water scarcity, reducing annual per capita availability of water to less than one thousand cubic metres for 250 million people in 26 countries, thus generating a mammoth thirst which will extend to two-thirds of the world population by 2025.
Already 20 million people in six west and central African countries are suffering severe water shortages because Lake Chad has shrunk to five per cent of its initial size in less than 40 years. Two-thirds of China's towns suffer from serious shortage of water resources. And experts fear that fully 60 per cent of Iran's rural inhabitants will be forced to emigrate because of drought.
It is expected that the amount of water needed to produce food for the population of the world in 2025 will increase by 50 per cent. Because of widespread drought, food production worldwide is expected to decrease by 10 per cent. The rise in prices of basic food staples could expose 1.3 billion people to death by starvation. There are many reasons for the crisis, including the mismanagement of water resources by developing countries, global warming, drought that will bring about still greater deforestation and the depletion of subterranean supplies of groundwater. Warning that the proportion of two fifths of the world's population now suffering from lack of water is expected to rise to two thirds by 2025, the report recommended that the global water crisis receive top billing in the agenda of the global summit on sustainable development to be held next year.
However, the UNEP report's reminder that we have only one interdependent planet to share seems to have fallen on deaf ears in Washington, where Bush first reneged on his election promise to pass legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions, then, to the amazement and dismay of the rest of the world, refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. The new American president has thus exposed not only the United States, which produces a fourth of the world's emissions, but the planet's whole biosphere to climatic changes with a direct impact on the water crisis. As temperatures rise, the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps will melt, causing sea and ocean levels to rise and further complicating the global water equation by exposing sweet water to infiltration by salt water and encouraging mass exoduses from regions threatened with drought towards regions with more water.
The reasons for migration from one spot on the globe to another are increasing. We have seen how the immigration of Zionists to Palestine unleashed one of the most virulent conflicts of the 20th century. In the age of globalisation, mass displacements on an unprecedented scale are taking place in a variety of directions. The deterioration of the water situation should be followed up not only on the global scale, but also on the regional, especially that the extended deserts of the Arab countries make them particularly vulnerable in conditions of widespread drought. Israel is already taking measures to avoid the impact of water shortage on its future. It is conducting systematic research aimed at reducing the costs of desalinating sea water and making it economical for widespread use throughout the region. Israel's efforts in this field are not only for economic and commercial purposes, but also aim at political and security objectives.
A technological breakthrough here would greatly enhance its bargaining power towards the region as a whole. It is getting ready to launch a desalination super-project that would unfold under its supervision from the Gulf to the Atlantic, and include all the Arab deserts. Whether we like it or not, we can find ourselves faced with an Israeli undertaking that will give it a monopoly over the production of potable water at economic prices, thanks to technological know-how to which only Israel holds the key. Water shortage could well become a weapon by which Israel will impose its will over vast areas of Arab territory.
The water dimension is ushering in an entirely new stage in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with features very different from all those that have gone before it -- a stage that will not be limited to Palestine and the Arab lands in its immediate vicinity, but will extend as far as Arab deserts go. This places the Arabs before new challenges that entail a new approach. Instead of letting these new challenges determine our future, we should launch desalination projects of our own along the same lines as projects underway to establish trans-Arab electricity networks and a system of petroleum and natural gas pipes that would ensure benefiting from such commodities in optimal conditions. This would be in line with the implementation of the Amman summit resolutions calling for interconnecting the Arab countries in a variety of manners.
Rising up to the challenge will not only prevent Israel from imposing its hegemony in such fields, but will foil its attempts to ensure that the most acute contradictions in the region are those among the Arabs and not between Arabs and Israelis. If it is true that peace cannot be achieved without a measure of parity between the protagonists, it is equally true that parity should not be limited to the military field, but should extend to a variety of non-military fields as well. In conditions of water scarcity and severe drought, producing potable water is no less effective a tool to defeat an adversary's supremacy than the most sophisticated weapons.
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