Article: Analysis: Emerging water wars

Analysis: Emerging water wars
5/17/2002
SKOPJE, Macedonia, May 17, 2002 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Growing up in Israel in the 1960s, we were always urged to conserve precious water. Rainfall was rare and meager, the sun scorching, our only sweet water lake under constant threat by the Syrians. Israelis were being shot at while hauling water cisterns or irrigating their parched fields. Water was a matter of life and death -- literally.

Drought often conspires with man-made disasters. Macedonia experienced its second worst dry spell during the last years civil strife. Benighted Afghanistan is having one now -- replete with locusts. Rapid, unsustainable urbanization, desertification, exploding populations, and economic growth, especially of water-intensive industries, such as microprocessor fabricators -- all contribute to the worst water crisis the world has ever known.

Governments have reacted late, hesitantly, and haltingly. Water conservation, desalination, water rights exchanges, water pacts, private-public partnerships, and privatization of utilities -- such as in Argentina and Britain -- may have been implemented too little, too late.

Rising incomes lead to civic movements and non-governmental organizations exerting political pressure on the authorities to improve water quality and availability. But can the authorities help? According to the World Bank, close to $600 billion will be needed by 2010 just to augment existing reserves and to improve water grade levels.

The U.N. Development Program believes that half the population in Africa will be subject to wrenching water shortages in 25 years. The environmental research institute, Worldwatch, quoted by British Broadcasting Corp., recommends food imports as a way to economize on water.

It takes 1,000 tons of water to produce one ton of grain, and agriculture consumes almost 70 percent of the worlds water -- though only less than 30 percent in Organization

for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, countries. It takes more than the entire throughput of the Nile to grow the grain imported annually by Middle Eastern and North African countries alone. Some precipitation-poor countries even grow cotton and rice, both insatiable crops. By 2020, says the World Water Council, we will be short 17 percent of the water that would be needed to feed the population.

The United States withdraws one-fifth of its total resources annually -- proportionately, one-half of Belgiums drawdown. But according to the OECD, Americans are the most profligate consumers of fresh water, more than double the OECDs average in the 1990s. Britain and Denmark have actually reduced their use by 20 percent between 1980 and 1996 -- probably due to sharp and ominous drops in their water tables.

Stratfor, a strategic forecasting firm, reported on May 14 that Mexico and the United States are in the throes of a conflict over Mexicos "failure to live up to its water supply commitments under a 1944 treaty," which allocates water from the Colorado, Rio Concho, and Rio Grande between the two signatories.

Mexico seems to have accumulated a daunting debt of 1.5 million acre feet over the last eight years, the result of a decade-long drought. Each acre-foot is an acre of water, one foot high. Mexicos reservoirs are less than 25 percent full. Some of the water, though, has been used to transform its borderland into a major producer of fresh vegetables for the American market -- at the expense of Texas farmers.

Faced with the worst drought in more than a century in some states, the Bush administration announced on May 3 that it is considering sanctions, including, perhaps the suspension of water supplies from the Colorado to Mexico. Texas lawmakers demanded to re-open North American Free Trade Agreement and amend it punitively.

Mexico is a typical case. Only 9 percent of its stream