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http://www.guerrillanews.com/newswire/20.html Guerrilla News Network April 16, 2001 Water: The Coming Conflict By Anthony Lappe In the opening to the movie "Mad Max," civilization as we know it is destroyed by a massive war over oil. Twenty years ago, this didn't seem far-fetched. The oil crises of the late 70s ingrained in many of us a belief that scarcity of petroleum would bring us to the brink. It may still. But oil, it turns out, is not disappearing as fast as what was once thought. By some estimates, it could be another century before we are actually faced with a real oil crisis, especially if alternative energies are developed to augment our reliance on petroleum. Long before we start killing each other to gas up our SUVs, humans will be faced with the depletion of another of the world's non-renewable resources - fresh water. Simply put, water is life. The human body is 70% water. People begin to feel thirsty after a loss of only 1% of bodily fluids and risk death if fluid loss nears 10%. Human beings can survive for only a few days without fresh H2O. Yet today, more than one billion people already lack access to fresh drinking water, according to the United Nations. Waterborne diseases account for an estimated 80% of all illnesses in developing countries. And global consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth. By 2025, two-thirds of the world's population may be living in a state of serious water deprivation. Already in places like China, India, Mexico, Thailand, the western United States, north Africa, and the Middle East, water is being pumped from underground until it is too salty or until the supply is depleted. Since almost all of the world's fresh water comes from ancient underground aquifers which, like oil reserves, are non-renewable: once they're gone . . . they're gone. A "Mad Max"-like scenario is not hard to imagine. According to the United Nations, some 3,000 of these basins are already the source of current conflicts. Once the various "water mining" practices currently being used start to fail and the level of need rises to desperate levels, these conflicts could escalate from acrimonious squabbling into war. In countries like Mexico the situation is already severe. Roughly 12 million Mexicans, one out of eight, have no access to safe drinking water. "Mexico's new president, Vicente Fox, calls water "a national security issue," and it is not hard to see why. Mexico lies along the same latitudes as the Sahara, and nearly half its land is bone dry. It has less drinking water per capita than Egypt, and 60 percent less than it did 50 years ago." (NYT 04/15/01) In Central Asia, where most foreign eyes have been on the region's vast untapped oil reserves, water is increasingly becoming a flash-point. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are trying to use their control over the water supply as a way to gain leverage in the region. In the dry Middle East, water has been source of power since ancient times. Israel's control over the Jordan River's headwaters and basin has been key part of their control over the Palestinians and their diplomatic relations neighboring Jordan, who also must rely on Israel for much of its water. The Israeli army maintains a special unit devoted to destroying its enemies' dams and springs. In 1985, former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then Egypt's minister of state for foreign affairs, warned, "The next war in the Middle East will be fought over water, not politics." Like anything worth fighting over, there is a lot of money to be made in water. Mega-corporations, like Bechtel and Monsanto (see NewsWire: Farmers Beware for more on Monsanto's other ventures ), are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to buy up local water systems and sell water like any other commodity on the open market to the highest bidder. Many developing nations worry that this will mean obtaining access to clean water will increasingly become a luxury and not a right for millions if not billions of citizens. Many are looking to technology to address the problem: Newly declassified satellites are helping agencies and governments find clean water; new desalinization techniques are starting to make what has always been a prohibitively costly process into the realm of practicality; massive public works programs - canals and tunnels - are being built at the cost of billions; and more outlandish schemes, like melting polar glaciers, are being looked at. But just as chemical farming (the so-called Green Revolution) was promoted as a solution to feeding the world, no amount of technology will change the fact that political and commercial realities shape who gets what piece of the globalized pie. And you can bet when realpolitik and profit are the driving forces behind control of the world's water - the people, and the planet, are sure to lose. -- For more information on this issue, check out these links: Project Censored, a California non-profit that tracks stories that have not been widely reported in the mainstream media, picked Water Privatization as their #1 Most Censored Story of 2000 . The Conflict Prevention Newsletter aims to focus upon thematic issues, which are under-exposed in other media. Their first special is on Water and Conflict . World's Water, a site dedicated to providing up-to-date water information, data, and web connections to organizations, institutions, and individuals working on a wide range of global freshwater problems and solutions . Copyright (c) 2001 Guerrilla News Network. All Rights Reserved.