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The next war? - no it's already
on at the Mau!
The next war
By Al Kags
Sunday July 10, 2005
Major conflicts in Africa over the
next 25 years could be due to that most precious of commodities
— water.
Water wars are likely to erupt in
areas where rivers and lakes are shared by more than one country,
according to a United Nations Development Programme report.
Possible flashpoints are the Nile,
Niger, Volta and Zambezi basins. The report predicts population
growth and economic development will lead to nearly one in two
people in Africa living in countries facing water scarcity or
‘water stress’ within 25 years.
Water scarcity is defined as less
than 1,000 cubic metres of the precious liquid available per
person per year, while water stress means that less than 1,500
cubic metres are available annually per individual.
The report says that by 2025, 12
more African countries will join the 13 that already suffer from
water stress or water scarcity.
Lester Brown, the influential head
of the environmental research institute Worldwatch believes that
water scarcity is now "the single biggest threat to global
food security".
He adds: "There is already
little water left when the Nile reaches the sea."
At least 10 countries in Africa
could revert to armed conflict because of the Nile waters. The
root of the problem is two agreements signed during the colonial
era — the 1929 Nile Water Agreement and the 1959 Agreement for
the Full Utilisation of the Nile — that gave Egypt and Sudan
extensive rights over the river’s use.
Upstream countries, including
Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, have expressed concern over the
long-standing arrangements, arguing the treaties have given Egypt
unfair control over the use of the river’s waters. None of the
colonial treaties involved all the riparian countries and,
therefore, did not cater for their interests, they say.
Countries in East Africa say they
want to abrogate the treaties, which they regard as outmoded
colonial relics. They say the agreements completely ignore the
interests of the other countries in the Basin. But Egypt, a
well-armed country by any standards, says any attempt to alter or
violate the treaty will be regarded as an act of war.
Undeterred, in February last year,
Tanzania launched a $27.6 billion project to draw drinking water
from Lake Victoria in contravention of the treaties. Kenya, also
short of water, is pushing for the treaties to be revised.
A Ugandan MP, Amon Muzoora, in 2002
moved a Motion in Parliament for the country to renounce the
pre-independence Nile water agreements. He made claims for an
annual compensation of $1.2 million.
Uganda needs hydroelectric power to
solve its energy problems. Ethiopia has long desired to start
large-scale irrigation projects to counter endemic drought which
has left 13 million people hungry.
In 1980, Egypt threatened war with
Ethiopia after the latter’s President Mengistu Haile Mariam
opposed attempts by the former’s leader, Anwar Sadat, to divert
waters to the Sinai Desert.
Lester predicts that even today,
Egypt is unlikely to take kindly to losing out to Ethiopia — a
country with one-tenth of its income. Indeed, water is already a
catalyst for regional conflict.
Egypt is the country with most at
stake in the water wars. The arid country has virtually no other
source of fresh water. However, other countries argue that Egypt
and Sudan are already making use of the Nile for commercial
purposes including water exports and growing cash crops.
In the last decade, efforts towards
cooperation in the Nile basin have intensified. In 1993, the
Technical Cooperation Committee for the Promotion of the
Development and Environmental Protection of the Nile Basin was
established with the aim of promoting a development agenda.
In the same year, the first in a
series of Nile 2002 Conferences, supported by the Canadian
International Development Agency took place. Within the framework
of the cooperation committee, the Nile River Basin Action Plan was
prepared in 1995. In 1997, the World Bank, UNDP and the Canadian
International Development Agency began working as ‘cooperating
partners’ to facilitate further dialogue among the Nile’s
riparian states.
In 1998, all the riparian states
except Eritrea began discussions with the aim of creating a
regional partnership to better manage the Nile. A transitional
mechanism for cooperation was officially launched in February 1999
in Dar es Salaam by the Council of Ministers of Water Affairs of
the Nile Basin States (Nile-COM). The process was named the Nile
Basin Initiative later in the same year and in November 2002, a
secretariat was established in Entebbe, Uganda, with funding from
the World Bank.
Burundi, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda,
the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya and
Rwanda are all involved in the NBI, with Eritrea being an observer.
According to Antoine Sendama, one
of the Nile Basin Initiative’s regional coordinators, the 10
countries which share the Nile and its sources met to find a way
of using the Nile "sustainably and effectively towards
development". Fresh water is also becoming increasingly
unusable because of pollution. Given Africa’s increasing
population, Worldwatch says that one way of easing the demand for
water is importing grain.
Agriculture is by far the biggest
consumer of water in Africa, accounting for 88 per cent of usage.
It takes about 1,000 tonnes of water to produce a tonne of grain.
According to Worldwatch, the water needed to produce the annual
combined imports of grain by the Middle East and North Africa is
equivalent to the annual flow of the Nile.
Importing grain is much easier than
importing water, but for poorer countries in Africa, it may not be
an option. For this reason the UN proposes monitoring worldwide
reserves of drinking water and establishing agreements for the use
of the precious commodity.
Investing in water pays
By Al Kags
At the turn of the 18th Century, as
Europeans who had just migrated into America inched westwards,
discovering more of the new country, a gleeful cry of "gold!"
was heard.
Despite coming from the dangerous
wild west, the cry galvanised entire families into relocating to
the then Mexican territories of Texas, San Francisco, what is
today New Mexico and California in search of fortune.
The fortune was found and the cry
infused even greater frenzy and motivation to the people’s
precarious lifestyles. Anarchy reigned and the quest for wealth
drove people to work, fight and live. As economic situations tend
to do, it shaped society.
In subsequent years, in our
lifetimes even, wars almost wholly motivated by the quest for
wealth in the form of black gold — oil — have been vigorously
fought and millions of lives affected. It has even been claimed in
many quarters — not least the well researched anti- George Bush
documentary movie 911 — that the just-concluded wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq were really about oil and that all notions of
liberation were a hoax.
Scientists now predict that in
coming years, most likely within this generation, vicious wars
will be fought over the new gold — water. They say that the dim
forecast of weather patterns that is likely to precede more
droughts and pestilence will precipitate battles for water rights
in different regions.
"In 2025 we will have another
two billion people to feed and 95 per cent of them will be in
urban areas," said Professor Jan Lundqvist of Stockholm
International Water Institute.
A report by the World Commission on
Water for the 21st Century says: "the arithmetic of water
simply does not add up." It predicts that within 20 years,
the world is likely to need more water to grow food than it will
be able to find.
Only 2.5 per cent of the world’s
water is not saline. Two-thirds of it is trapped in icecaps and
glaciers. Of the rest, about 20 per cent is to be found in remote
areas while most of what is left comes at the wrong time and in
the wrong place, as with monsoons and floods. The amount of fresh
water available for human use is less than 0.08 per cent of all
the water on Earth.
About 70 per cent of the world’s
fresh water is already being used for agriculture and according to
the report, the demands of industry and energy will grow rapidly.
The World Water Council report
estimates that in the next two decades, the use of water by humans
will increase by about 40 per cent and that 17 per cent more water
than is available will be needed to grow food.
"Aquatic ecosystems throughout
the world have been degraded and will need greater protection, and
water quality is deteriorating in poor countries," the report
continues, concluding, "Only rapid and imaginative
institutional and technological innovation can avoid the crisis."
The answer to the water problem
lies in sustained investment in infrastructure. An estimated $80
billion is invested each year in the water sector, but this needs
to at least double, said Professor Frank Rijsberman, the
International Water Management Institute’s director general.
"I think if I look at the
numbers, I can’t immediately see a way out over the next few
years," said the report’s co-author, Dr David Molden.
"I think we will reach a real crisis."
The commission recommended the
establishment of a water innovation fund, owing to the need to
change water management practices. It added that global investment
in water needed to go up from the present $70b to $80b annually,
to $180b, with almost all the new investment coming from the
private sector. But governments "remain the key actors in the
solution, by what they do or do not do, and how they choose to do
it.
The report stressed on the need to give people who use water the
final say over how it is utilised. The commission called for the
formation of "users’ parliaments" where water
consumers would play a major role in managing aquifers and river
basins in conjunction with their national governments.
Africa may host at least one water
war in our lifetime because of its infant management systems and
high poverty rates. The continent is facing major challenges with
food scarcity being experienced, even in comparatively
well-performing economies like Kenya’s.
However, David Gatende, the
managing director of Davis & Shirtliff, the largest water
treatment and equipment company in Kenya, believes that the focus
on Africa by G8 countries, the Live 8 concert and discussions on
debt relief and poverty eradication can only be a boon for the
continent.
"Provision of portable
drinking water has tremendous spin offs in terms of improved
health (fewer water borne diseases), better education (more time
in class for students) and superior quality of life," he
contends.
Sandra Postel is the author of a
book published by the Worldwatch institute on the impending crisis.
In the book titled Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle
Last? she says: "Without increasing water productivity in
irrigation, major food producing regions will not have enough
water to sustain crop production."
"Some 40 per cent of the
world’s food comes from irrigated cropland and we’re betting
on that share to increase to feed a growing population,"
Postel says in the book. One threat to the productivity of
irrigation, she adds, is excessive pumping of groundwater from
subterranean aquifers.
Earlier research by Worldwatch
illustrated the scale of the problem:
l Between 1991 and 1996, the water
table beneath northern China plain fell by an average of 1.5
metres annually.
l Almost everywhere in India, the
water table is falling at between one and three meters annually.
l Mexico City is sinking because of
the amount of water being pumped out from beneath it.
Gatende notes that two main
entities contribute to improved provision of water to the
mwananchi:
"First, the ongoing
implementation of the Water Boards and Water Service Companies
will have a great impact on water harnessing, conservation and
utility," he said. "Second, Constituency Development
Funds are being directed towards water projects which clearly many
MPs and constituents feel will make the biggest immediate
difference to people’s lives. In our work, we have seen the
projects do change lives dramatically."
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