Arguing over the world's water resources

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Arguing over the world's water resources

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 “Whisky is for drinking, water is for fighting over”.  Mark Twain.

Wm. Mulholland will go down in history as a water engineer who was a very sharp operator.  Sensing that the town of Los Angeles was growing rapidly, he negotiated away the water rights of the Owens Valley, 233-miles north of Los Angeles and built a huge aqueduct and 164 tunnels to transport the water from the Owens Valley across the Mojave desert.  At a ceremony the day it was opened, Mulholland spoke his famous words: "There it is. Take it" (Wikipedia).

Within 13 years the aqueduct had drained the 100-square-mile Owens Lake dry (starting the California Water Wars, the story of the film Chinatown). The acquisition of water rights  involved bribery and deception by Mulholland. The Owens Valley farmers tried to dynamite the aqueduct, to divert the flow of water. Los Angeles was forced to negotiate, and Mulholland was quoted as saying he "half-regretted the demise of so many of the valley’s orchard trees, because now there were no longer enough trees to hang all the troublemakers who live there", according to his grand daughter, Rose Mulholland.  But the future of Los Angeles was assured, as were the fortunes of the farmers in the San Fernando Valley. They got unlimited supplies of water for their cotton production, their famous orchards and their vegetables.

Enough water?

We have a serious water crisis in parts of the world, with serious polution of some rivers, at least lakes (the Aral Sea and Lake Chad) badly damaged through over-use and arguments over the sharing of water resources. These disasters are not caused by nature:  they are made entirely by our folly. Yet we also need to remember that there is more than enough water in the world to satisfy everyone.  Planet Earth’s systems pump out enough water each year to give each person nearly 7,000 cubic metres. (The data in this account is taken from the excellent UN Human Development Report 2006: Beyond Scarcity….global water crisis, edited by the erudite, painstaking Kevin Watkins).  Hydrologists reckon that people need an average of 1,700 cubic metres to survive comfortably each year.  But we should remember that many don’t get enough. People in the G<?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = ST1 />aza Strip for example get only 320 cubic metres a year (compared with Americans who consume 1,900 cubic metres each year). So why are there so many arguments over how to share the world’s water supplies? There are a huge number of rivers that have to be shared between countries. One hundred and forty-five countries that have to exist within these shared basins, accounting for over 90% of the world’s populations.  Some of the countries in these river basins get together and resolve their disagreements over the allocation of this water between them.  Others act first, and argue later, and this can produce disastrous results.

“By means of water we give life to everything”.  Koran

There are four major problems in sharing water between countries.  First, competition for supplies.  The dilemma is within those basins where one country gets its water up-stream and then leaves what it does not require for countries further down-stream.  Being up-stream of course hugely improves one’s bargaining position!  Second, the quality of the water.  Many rivers start off in pristine condition (this includes sufficient levels of oxygen to ensure the health of a river’s fishes) and end up full of sewage and other toxins – nitrates, phosphates, arsenic, many other toxic metals and of course salt. The River Rhine is the most polluted in Europe:  a fifth of the entire world’s chemical production lies along its banks and many of these factories discharge their waste into this river.  Third, the timing of the supplies.  Countries require a stable supply.  In those basins where the rainfall is low, this can be difficult and such projects as dam building can aggravate the problems.  Fourth, the essential supplies contained in the water.  Many river deltas rely on the silt brought down by their rivers to maintain the fertility of their soils.  Many also rely on a steady supply of fish (and even plants) in the river.  Again, dam building can create a huge amount of damage, if we shall see.

Colorado/Rio Grande:

Take the huge water systems of the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, for example. The Colorado River runs for 1,450 miles, through Arizona and and down past Mexico, supplying water to a region that receives little annual rainfall. The river is used for irrigation for the US cotton farmers as well as for generating hydroelectric power and for supplying water to distant urban areas. It even provides water for southern California’s Imperial Valley, a productive agricultural region converted from a desert. Typically, the Americans can use whatever they want because the river runs through the US first.  And the Mexicans are left with the dregs!  As a result, the vast wetlands at the mouth of the Colorado River have been reduced to just a fraction of their former size and the river has shrivelled to a mere trickle.  Mexico receives almost none of the water it requires to sustain its population.  The Rio Grande, at 1,885 miles, is the third longest river in the US, running through texas and ending in the Gulf of Mexico.  In 2001 for the first time, the delta formed a sandbar 150 metres wide, so that the river failed to empty into the sea for the first time ever. A fore-taste of the future?  If so, the stream of water disputes between both countries will develop into a torrent. What is so striking about these, many conflicts is that they get resolved only through expensive and slow court cases.  No one appears to meet regularly to thrash out any of the issues;  both sides probably build up misleading stereotypes of the other side and so the conflicts get amplified!

Tigris-Euphrates:

A common conflict in this two-river basin centres on irrigation demands.  These issues are critical in areas such as the Middle East, with its hot climate and low rainfall levels.  Among countries with highly developed irrigation systems Egypt, Iraq, Syria all depend on water flowing from their neighbours for at least two-thirds of their water. The Tigris-Euphrates basin serves Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, with a total population there of 103 millions. Turkey’s south-east region (Anatolia) has seen the creation of 21 dams and 1.7 million hectares of irrigated land, and this can reduce the flow of water in Syria by about a third, creating huge conflicts. (Medzioni and Wolf: the Euphrates river watershed. World Bank 2006).  Of course, given that this region is the 'cradle of civilisation', some of the disputes go far back into the mists of time. And, like elephants, some of  these actors do not easily forget! Yet these obstacles could be overcome:  the resources are there to achieve equitable solutions.  Neuro-Linguistic Programmers (NLP) have a saying: "If the situation isn't working, then change the situation"!  If these nations cannot agree any solutions based merely on how they share this one resource, they could reframe the issues in another picture altogether, that of multi-lateral trade between them.  Clearly they have other resources in abundance - wheat, meats, citrus fruits, vegetables and of course oil.  It is not impossible to rewrite the terms of trade to include water as one of the many resources exchanged.  Defining it merely as one more commodity rather than as something bound up with issues of national identity, takes the emotional heat out of the arguments.

But there is cause for hope.  “Those who have studied water conflicts find almost no conflicts where water triggered the conflict,” says Daniel Zimmer, executive director of the World Water Council. “Water is ultimately a source of collaboration rather than war. It is so vital you cannot afford to have a war over it.” Zimmer points to this month’s agreement between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq to jointly establish a water institute to study and monitor trans-border water resources. Instead taking up arms, the three countries decided to take the first steps towards a permanent, peaceful solution over their longstanding water disputes. 

Jordan River:

The problem is more acute in the Israeli-Jordon-Palestine water conflicts.  Here, the area is one of the most water-scarce areas in the world.  The Palestinian population relies almost entirely on trans-boundary water, most of it shared with Israel. Much of this is shared unequally.  The Palestinian population is half the size of Israel but they consume only 10-15% as much water.  On the West Bank, Israeli settlers consume on average 620 cubic metres per person annually and the Palestinians are left with less than100 cubic metres.  In the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), people get an average of 320 cubic metres of water annually, one of the lowest levels in the world. Water shortages in the Occupied Territories are a major constraint on agricultural development and livelihoods and many Palestinians see it as a long term injustice because the current water allocation rules lock in this unequal access to the aquifers.

As the aquifers sink because of over-extraction on one side of the border, so the water table replenishes itself with polluted water sources – often sea water – and this water contains arsenic, nitrates and sulphates, often making the groundwater unusable in the other countries. So what explains these gross inequities?  First, Palestinians do not have established rights to the waters of the Jordan Basin.  Almost all the water needs in the OPT are met by groundwater aquifers.  But the Palestinians get very little water from even these aquifers!  Nearly three quarters of the aquifer is recharged within the West Bank, and flows from the West Bank towards the sea but much of this is not used by the Palestinians.  Why?  Because Israeli representatives on the Joint Water Committee stringently regulate the quantity and depth of wells operated by the Palestinians.  Less stringent rules are applied to Israeli settlers enabling them to sink deeper wells.  With only 13% of all wells in the West Bank, Israeli settlers account for about 53% of groundwater extraction.  This may seem outrageous but it comes as no surprise to anyone living in the middle east.  It means that irrigation is under-developed, not because the Palestinians do not want it, but primarily because there is insufficient water available.  Also, because of the water shortages, many Palestinians rely on outside deliveries from Israeli companies, which are vulnerable and often unreliable.  Also, the building of the Separation Wall has meant that some Palestinians have lost their wells which have become separated from their fields, especially around the very fertile regions around Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem and Ramallah.  These stresses are in stark contrast with what occurs in Jordan since the Peace Accord between Israel and Jordan in 1994.  Since then both countries have co-operated to build water storage facilities in Lake Tiberias thus improving water supplies for Jordan farmers.  As the UN Report points out:  “Perhaps more than in any other setting, water security between Israel and the OPT is bound up in wider problems of conflict and perceptions of national security”. How true!  Both sides to these disputes are clearly stuck, with the Israelis happy to keep hold of the rigid rules that exclude the Palestinians.  What I don't understand is how all the "Middle East envoys" who visit the region endlessly seem to be blind to these daily irritations.  Any community activist certainly knows that "looking for (and finding) manageable issues that might be resolved through dialogue"  is classic organiser stuff to help both sides appreciate that progress can be made (genuine confidence building!) in order to mobilise their energy to take further steps.

Mekong River:

This is one of the world’s major water systems. Its source lies in the Tibetan Plateau. It then drops 5,000 metres to flow across six countries before it reaches the enormously fertile Mekong Delta (the breadbasket of Viet Nam).  More than a third of the population of Cambodia, Laos (LPDR), Thailand and Viet Nam (60 million people) live in the Lower Mekong Basin and use the river as drinking water, food (fishing), irrigation, hydro-power, transportation and commerce.  Millions more in China and Burma benefit from the river.  Also, in the plains of the river basin, lies half the arable land of Thailand (Isaan Province).  Further downstream, in Cambodia lies the important Tonle Sap Lake, one of the most productive freshwater fishing areas in the world, with its unusual water movements throughout the year.  Because of the plentiful water supplies in this part of the Mekong during the rainy season, the Lake floods to three times its size and the water flows upstream during certain seasons. It currently has an abundant supply of 700 different varieties of fish, probably the most productive lake in the world. And it relies solely on the Mekong for this sustenance.

It is this lack of parity between countries along the Mekong River that stands out as the most serious and striking in the world.  The conflicts in this area are aggravated because two of the significant players in the region do not belong to the negotiating commission (now called the Mekong River Commission, a body that was re-formed in 1995), namely China and Burma. This gives very little purchase on the Commission’s ability to negotiate realistically between the parties concerned. In addition, the scale of the problem for China is far less significant than it is for the other Mekong bounded countries:  One fifth of the Mekong Basin lies in China, but that represents only 2 percent of China’s territory.  Further downstream, more than four-fifths of Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR) and nearly 90 percent of Cambodia are inside the basin.  This absence of China (as well as at times China’s secretive behaviour over what it is building along the River) has caused huge problems in the region. (These issues are covered by Milton Osborne, in his The Mekong, 2001). This seriously weakens what level of negotiations the countries can enter into and what compromises they can achieve.  As the UN Report comments rather blandly:  “most cooperations (in these conflicts) is quite shallow”.  

A huge issue for all these countries concerns the consequences of China’s programme of dam building and what it does to change the effect of the river both for fishing stocks. Thai newspapers are full of descriptions of demonstrations around the issues of people being forced off their smallholdings, without sufficient compensation, or of finding the fishing stocks dwindling so much, the fishermen can no longer make a living.  And no officials will take any notice.  Downstream countries like Cambodia and Vietnam see upstream dams constructed by China as a threat to the “flood pulse” (the different water levels between the wet and dry seasons) of the river and the livelihoods it sustains. Nearly half of Cambodia’s populations benefit from these resources.  As the river nears Viet Nam, this river delta supplies more than half of the country’s rice output and a third of its GDP.  Seventeen million Vietnamese people live in this part of the country. This part of the River is so productive that, in Pol Pot’s time of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot tried very hard to annexe the Delta to Cambodia, arguing that it had previously been a part of the country and should be returned (according to Grant Evans and Kelvin Rowley in Red Brotherhood At War, London 1990).

Yet, looking back over the last half-century, the biggest surprise is that so few of these conflicts have turned at all violent through the inequitable allocation of water supplies.  Relations in nearly all these conflicts have been quite durable in spite of their differences.  This suggests that the countries appreciate how much they may have in common, and want to preserve that.  Of course, bringing these common interests out in the open so that they can be acknowledged and mobilised would help to energise their resolve to greater dialogue (that sentence sounds a bit pompous to me even as I write it, but there is some truth in this. Trust me!) Yet some of their current pronouncements should be taken with a big pinch of salt, according to Osborne Milton; such as when the Chinese reported in 1998, when told about the fish stocks being seriously depleted, “Yes. The Fish Is Still There”.  The Chinese may irritate their neighbours but each side to the conflicts know they also share common interests too:  in getting enough water and not creating any destructive solutions.  Looking back in time, it is striking that the Mekong Committee (as it then was) the body that included Cambodia, LPDR, Thailand and Viet Nam continued to exchange information during the Viet Nam War even though they were not all on the same side. After the first Chinese dam was completed in 1982, E.C.Chapman & H.Daming, in their article in Development Dilemmas, (1996) wrote: “Since the Manwan was completed….. mis-information has been developed as an art form amounting to the irresponsible reporting of gross inaccuracies”.  Here is another No Go conflict where China refuses to appreciate the benefits of co-operation. A bullying nation that usually gets its own way?  That way will surely end in tears!

Water rights?

 “The human right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic use”. So wrote the United Nations in 2002.  What a wonderful ideal.  But what does this really mean, down at the ‘coal face’ where people have to struggle for affordable and clean water?  Will the UN take any action to ensure people get enough water, as well to prevent them from getting diarrhea or dysentry or the many other water born diseases so many people suffer from as a result of toxic water supplies? Of course they won’t!  To be fair, though, I have chosen some of the more intractable disputes for this article.  I could have drawn a number of other scenarios where disputes are thrashed out honestly and the parties involved come to amicable compromises (they don't make such interesting copy!). Nevertheless, we have to remind ourselves that there has not been a war over water supplies for a very long time.  The last big battle over water occurred in what is now the southern part of Iraq and that was over four thousand years ago!   So Mark Twain was incorrect.  Water is not often seriously fought over in the world in spite of 145 countries being obliged to share their resources with each other.