Scarcity, Yes; Conflicts, Maybe
Water shortages cause water tensions — that much is obvious. But do water tensions lead to water conflicts or even war, and under what circumstances? If so, where are they most likely?
As I wrote in the first chapter, there are two distinct but overlapping problems with the world’s water: one is dirty water, the contamination of water supplies even in areas where water itself is relatively abundant; the other is where water, dirty or clean, is in short supply. The same two crises can be causes of water tensions too, complicated by local, regional, national, and sometimes transnational tensions. Sometimes these may arise from water directly; in others, water becomes a surrogate for greater conflicts.
Small and local doesn’t necessarily make the problems more tractable. In Cochabamba, the insertion of a profit-taking multinational into an area of great poverty set off rioting, a brief army occupation, and some entirely unnecessary deaths, followed by regime change. Water riots broke out in Mauritania when the ruling classes, mostly Arab, were perceived to be keeping water from the poor, mostly black, and again when desperate nomads from Mali crossed the border when their wells ran dry. Still in Mali, nomadic Fulani herdsmen were met by armed bands of Dogon pastoralists whose water they were stealing, not having any of their own. Livestock herders in Mongolia’s South Gobi Desert have been conducting raids on multinational mining companies over water abstractions. (So far, the herders, equipped with cell phones and an acute sense of their own entitlement, seem to be winning.) There are dozens of episodes like it, in Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, and many others places.
Some countries that are water stressed are managing badly; others are doing well. Qatar, almost always described as “oil-rich Qatar,” is a champion mismanager. It hardly ever rains in the Gulf (only eight centimetres a year, on average), the country has no lakes or rivers, and what meagre shallow aquifers once existed have long since been depleted. There is some deeper groundwater but not enough, and the country’s drinking water is supplied through energy-hungry desalination plants that consume more than a fifth of the country’s electricity generation. As in Saudi Arabia itself, this raises the unnerving prospect that the two will cease to be major exporters of petroleum because they will need what oil they have to produce the water without which they cannot survive. Nonetheless, in defiance of all pricing and conservation logic, water in unlimited quantities remains free to all Qataris. Singapore, on the other hand, is everyone’s poster child for smart management and thrift. The American Southwest falls somewhere in the middle — shortages there have been caused by poor assumptions made over the last 150 years that growth and water supply would never collide and that the climate would remain unchanged and unmodified. On the other hand, while the Americans may have miserably dysfunctional government, they have expertise and money aplenty and are, if rather belatedly, responding with the proper sense of urgency.
River basins and aquifers that cross national frontiers are the principal international flashpoint. In the last few years, violence or threats of violence have affected many parts of the world.
The most contentious are the same handful that have been sore points for decades. The Tigris and Euphrates basins, for example, affect Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. The Nile affects six countries but mostly Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt — Egypt has famously declared it would go to war to safeguard its rights to the Nile that are in 2014 once again threatened by the surprising fact that peace has broken out upstream. The Jordan basin (mostly the Jordan and Yarmuk Rivers) affects Israel, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon; water has already been used as a weapon for war in the region. The Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers are a main contention between India and Bangladesh. The Indus, which rises in Tibet but flows through India and Pakistan to its delta, raises tensions not only between India and Pakistan but also internally in India between the Sikh-dominated Punjab and the Hindu Haryana (a dispute that led, among other things, to the assassination of the Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi). In central Asia, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, two rivers whose diversions caused the destruction of the world’s fourth largest lake, the Aral Sea, are now the source of disputes between a clutch of post-Soviet independent countries. In 2012, despite the region being proclaimed a success of integrated water resources management (water-management partnerships and local committees have helped raise water productivity by 30 percent), there were serious clashes between Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan over water-allocation issues. Threats were delivered over cutting supplies, with retaliatory threats uttered about shutting down natural gas deliveries. On the other side of the Caspian, the Kura-Araks system, a major water source for Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, is also the subject of international wrangles. We will return to these. Elsewhere there is tension over the Okavango River, which acts as the border between Namibia and its two otherwise amiable neighbours, Botswana and Angola, and the Salween shared by China, Myanmar, and Thailand. Uganda has deployed army units to stop incursions of water-stressed herders from neighbouring Kenya.1
In Chapter 5, I quoted Ismail Serageldin, then a World Bank vice-president, as saying, “The wars of the 21st century will be fought over water.” Well, it remains to be seen — we’ve got 85 percent of the century to go — but so far, as many have pointed out, shooting wars just haven’t happened. A scrutiny of almost two thousand “water-related events” since 1950, in fact shows that two-thirds of all encounters were cooperative rather than antagonistic. More than 150 international water treaties were signed in the same period.
The Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick has compiled every researcher’s favourite water-conflict compendium, a comprehensive chronology dating back to 3000 BCE (that was when Ea, a Noah precursor, punished humanity with a six-day rainstorm). Ever since, water has been used as a weapon (poisoned wells, diverted canals, deliberate floods, and so on).
The first real “water war” was between two Mesopotamian city states, Lagash and Umma, in which Umma’s water was diverted into boundary canals to starve it out — and that was forty-five hundred years ago. But there have been many violent events around water in the interim, and, as Gleick pointed out in an email to me, they seem to be increasing. It is also true that Israel did exchange artillery and rocket fire with Syria over water, and it is now widely accepted that the 1967 Arab-Israeli war had its roots in water conflicts as well as in territorial and security concerns. It’s also true that many dire warnings have been issued about the Nile River, among them by two UN secretaries-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan, and Egypt has many times warned that attempts to tamper with its allocation of Nile water would be a casus belli. And it is also true that population and development pressures have made available per capita water increasingly scarce. And if two-thirds of water encounters have been amiable, by extension a third were not. Shots have been fired over water, dams have been blown up, water supplies tampered with or cut off, wells filled in or poisoned, hydroelectric stations bombed.
But water wars, in modern times?
Mark Zeitoun, a Canadian engineer-turned-social-scientist now working at the Water Security Research Centre at the University of East Anglia, has spent decades considering the notion of conflicts over water and the perennial and deeply political question of who gets how much water, and why.
Zeitoun’s contribution is to analyze water disputes that are neither the much-feared water wars nor the much-lauded examples of cross-boundary cooperation. In his view, conventional analysis downplays the role of “power asymmetry” between contesting nations. “The reason these conflicts fall short of war and are largely silent may have much more to do with the imbalance of power between the riparians than with a perceived cooperation between them,” as he put it.
With this in mind, he has suggested the notion of hydro-hegemony as a way of framing the discussion. As he wrote in a co-authored 2005 paper,
Hydro-hegemony is hegemony at the river-basin level, achieved through water resource control strategies such as resource capture, integration and containment. The strategies are executed through an array of tactics (e.g., coercion/pressure, treaties, knowledge construction, etc.) that are enabled by the exploitation of existing power asymmetries within a weak international institutional context. . . .
A few key questions may illustrate the point: If Turkey — upstream on the Tigris and the Euphrates — can build the GAP (Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi, the Turkish acronym for the South-eastern Anatolia Project), what is preventing Ethiopia from doing the same on the Nile? How is it that the Palestinians living on the West Bank of the Jordan River cannot approach the river, much less pump from it? The answers are found in power play. Power relations between riparians are the prime determinants of the degree of control over water resources that each riparian attains. Riparian position and the potential to exploit the water through hydraulic infrastructures also have some influence but are not determining except insofar as they are power related. In brief, upstreamers use water to get more power, downstreamers use power to get more water.
We emphasize that the absence of war does not mean the absence of conflict . . . to suggest that war is not a likely outcome of water disputes . . . is not to deny the passions that international water quite legitimately arouses. Virtual water and second-order resources become, in this light, useful mitigators of conflict-induced water scarcity but do little to address — and in some cases may even prolong — the conflict. Furthermore, we agree with others who emphasize the point that a significant factor preventing war over water is that the actions of non-hegemonic states usually comply with the order preferred by the hegemon, whose superior power position effectively discourages any violent resistance against the order.2
In other words, “peace” can be enforced by coercion, rather than by agreement or war.
Zeitoun’s point is that once you understand not only why conflicts happen but how “resolution” is avoided or arrived at by the more powerful countries, it becomes easier to edge toward more genuine cooperation. That is, “somewhere between unilateralism and comprehensive accords” (a phrase from Princeton scholar John Waterbury), modest steps can be made toward cooperation.
As Sandra Postel and Aaron Wolf pointed out in a piece for Foreign Policy magazine, “Whether or not water scarcity causes outright warfare between nations in the years ahead, it already causes enough violence and conflict within nations to threaten social and political stability. And . . . today’s civil conflicts have a nasty habit of spilling over borders and becoming tomorrow’s international wars. [Also] water disputes between countries . . . have fueled decades of regional tensions, thwarted economic development, and risked provoking larger conflict.”3 A National Intelligence Estimate prepared for the US State Department in 2012 concluded that
during the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will experience water problems — shortages, poor water quality, or floods — that will risk instability and state failure, increase regional tensions, and distract them from working with the United States on important US policy objectives. Between now and 2040, fresh water availability will not keep up with demand absent more effective management of water resources. Water problems will hinder the ability of key countries to produce food and generate energy, posing a risk to global food markets and hobbling economic growth. As a result of demographic and economic development pressures, North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia will face major challenges coping with water problems.4
An earlier OECD report, in 2005, pointed to another negative effect of water shortages — good development averted or delayed: “Tensions over water in an international river basin often mean that a shared resource is not developed. They result in, and are exacerbated by, a lack of structural stability, where capable, accountable, and responsive structures exist to peacefully manage and mitigate conflict.”5
What follows is a summary of the main global flashpoints, or “the bad bits,” as Pakistan’s water minister once called them.6
Toward the end of 2013, an Israeli ecologist and his counterpart in Gaza wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “Gaza Need Not Be a Sewer.” But the piece was less positive than the headline: Gaza was already a sewer, caused by the usual things bedevilling the region — Israeli intransigence, Hamas pig-headedness, Palestinian Authority vacillation, poverty, burgeoning population (1.7 million now, growing at better than 3 percent a year in a territory only forty kilometres by ten, with an eleven-kilometre border with Egypt and a fifty-one-kilometre border with Israel), and overall carelessness and neglect of the fragile environment.
When the piece appeared, Gaza hadn’t enough fuel to run both its electricity supply and its water and sewage facilities, mostly because of the Israeli and Egyptian blockades. Hamas, which governs Gaza, refused to contemplate buying alternate fuels because the taxes they generated would go to its political rival, the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority. As a result, pumping stations stopped operating in November 2013 and human excrement began flooding into the streets. I was struck by this plaintive paragraph in the Times piece, authored by Alon Tal and Yousef Abu-Mayla: “Aside from humanitarian decency, there are ample pragmatic reasons for Israel to be concerned. Every day, 90,000 cubic metres of sewage pours into the Mediterranean. Israel’s own drinking-water supply is increasingly dependent on seawater desalination. One of its largest facilities, in Ashkelon, is just a few miles north along the coast from Gaza. Erecting a fence can prevent terrorist infiltration, but it can’t stop the flow of feces.”7
The flow of feces, yes. Drifting feces are impervious to political control.
No one in the region seems to have learned this simple ecological fact, not yet.
The Middle East has always been the place where water wars were perceived to be most probable. As pointed out above, the Six Day War had its roots in water politics. Israel controls the Golan Heights for its water as well as for reasons of military security. In fact, the boundaries of the state of Israel are to some degree the result of water considerations.
The key is the Jordan River, which begins in three headwater streams and provides about 30 percent of the region’s water: the Hasbani originates in Syria and has at least a part of its outflow in Lebanon; the Dan and the Banias Rivers originate in the Golan Heights and flow into the Jordan above Lake Kinneret. The lower Jordan is fed from springs and runoff from the West Bank, Syrian, and Jordanian waters, and by the Yarmuk River, which rises in Syria, borders Jordan, Syria, and the Golan Heights (and so Israel), and empties into the Jordan at Adam Bridge. The Jordan Valley is thus an international drainage basin. This was acknowledged by the early Zionists. Chaim Weizmann, from the beginning of his quest for a Jewish national home, asserted his desire to have control of the valley of the Litani, for a distance of about 25 miles above the bend, and the western and southern slopes of Mount Hermon. Control of the Litani, the Jordan, and the Yarmuk was seen as critical to the future state’s security.8 David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, often demanded the same thing, and demanded too that the boundaries of Israel include the southern banks of the Litani. That one he didn’t get — it remains wholly in Lebanon. Israel has, on and off, established a “security zone” in Lebanon, and access to Litani waters was certainly one reason for doing so.
The whole region is drawing down its aquifers beyond replacement rates at somewhere around 15 percent a year, with the obvious result that water is complicating already difficult politics. If your taps run once a week and Israel’s taps seven days, from the same source, that’s a potent grievance to nurture. And it’s not just the aquifers that are being depleted: in 1953, the Jordan had an average flow of 1,250 million cubic metres at the Allenby Bridge near the Dead Sea; it now records flows fluctuating between 140 and 170 million cubic metres, an eighth of what it was. And the water in Israel’s National Water Carrier system is not as pristine as it should be; it contains mineral concentrations higher than is considered safe in Europe or the United States.
Nearly three-quarters of Israeli-Palestine water is groundwater, drawn from three aquifers, the Mountain, Eastern, and Coastal aquifers.
The Mountain aquifer is by the far the biggest of the three and for decades gave Israel about a quarter of its water — rather less now, since desalination plants are providing most of the country’s drinking water. For more than a decade, water engineers have warned that the Mountain aquifer has been overdrawn to the extent of permanently imperilling its existence. Worse, municipally-added chlorine and ill-treated sewage are both finding their way into the aquifer, as are traces of nitrates, soluble organic material, and heavy metals.
The Eastern aquifer lies under the West Bank, which draws almost all its water from this source. Of the three, it is in best shape, though it too is being over-pumped.
The Coastal aquifer is in deep crisis. As a UN report in 2012 acknowledged, the Coastal aquifer has been overexploited for many years, since Egypt controlled Gaza in the 1950s. Nearly 95 percent of its water is now unfit for human consumption because of pollution from seawater intrusion, fertilizers, and sewage. Millions of unregistered and unauthorized wells have been sunk nevertheless — water has to come from somewhere — which exacerbates the problem. The report’s conclusion was stark: Gaza may not be a “livable place” by 2020, unless it was remedied by “an enabling political environment,” tactfully left unspecified; and as of 2014, Hamas and Israel showed no signs of such enabling.9 Instead, Israel dismissed the report because one of its main conclusions was that Israel should abandon any blockading of Gaza in order to stimulate its economy and development. Israeli water authorities have offered to sell water to Gaza but only if the Palestinian Authority agreed — Israel does not deal with Hamas. Hamas has not responded, nor has Fatah.
There is plenty of desalinated water in Israel. Why not in Gaza? For more than twenty years, a major desal plant has been planned and even promised but never built. The reasons were partly technical — desal needs lots of power which Gaza doesn’t have — but overwhelmingly political. No one can agree on where it should go, who should build it, or who should benefit. So nothing is done and Gazans must perforce buy expensive bottled water.
In Jordan, where 80 percent of all land is desert and only 5 percent considered arable, and where water riots have become an annual rite of spring, hopes are pinned on two large-scale water transfer schemes. In 2012, villages were getting water once a week from the national water system, and in some provinces it was worse than that, villages often going without for two weeks out of three. It surely doesn’t help that water losses from rotting pipes averaged from 24 percent in some provinces to as high as 60 percent in others.
The first of the water transfers is the Disi Water Conveyance Project, constructed with World Bank and German Development Bank participation. (The second is the Med-Dead conveyance, already discussed in chapter 8.) It is designed to pump a hundred million cubic metres from the Disi aquifer, deep underground on the Saudi border, and take it to the capital, Amman, and thence to the northern provinces. The Amman branch went into operation in 2013; the northern route is supposed to be completed by the end of 2015. The cost is well over a billion dollars.
An independent study by Jordanian, Israeli, and American scientists found high radioactivity from many of the wells feeding the pipeline. The result was a flurry of reassuring press releases from the Jordanian authorities that pointed out that Saudis have been drinking from the same aquifer for years without apparent ill effect and that the Red Sea town of Aqaba has been using the same water for two decades without any “significant” increase in cancer rates. The water ministry, for its part, said not to worry because (a) the water could be diluted to bring it up to standard, (b) at any rate, the contaminant, radon, dissipated when exposed to air, and (c) the independent study was inaccurate. A former head of the Jordan Valley Authority, Dureid Mahasneh, said the radiation problem could be treated through a process called ion exchange, or by dilution, if water to dilute it could be found. Said Mahasneh: “We don’t like the results, but can we handle it? Yes.”10 Nonetheless, the Jordanians had to drink the water. It was all they had.
Its neighbourhood is a fractious one for Turkey. It shares borders with Iraq, a disintegrating state with ISIS troubling its heart; Syria, a disintegrated state with ISIS and a grab bag of rebel guerillas controlling parts of the country and the dictator, Assad, either on “our” side or not, depending on your perspective; and Iran, still a more or less theocratic autocracy, reeling from economic sanctions but a mortal enemy of ISIS and an unlikely ally of whoever will have it. And Turkey itself, of course, is still quivering from the aftershocks of the Gezi Park protests against Prime Minister Erdoğan’s apparently boundless ego.
All of this is complicated by a troubling water crisis: the waters of Babylon are running dry.11
It is especially troubling here, for the Fertile Crescent, as it was once known, was where irrigation was invented by the Sumerians, creators of humankind’s first urban civilization. They used the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers as a source of nourishment and energy, and the crescent from Baghdad to the Gulf bloomed while they became rich in art and culture and political power. Eventually, they disappeared or were absorbed and were followed by the Assyrians and the Babylonians, and by the conquering Greeks and then the Romans, who were supplanted by the Ottomans and Islam. And throughout it all the bountiful high hills of Anatolia continued their nourishing flow. No one thought it would end.
But no one counted on there being almost 80 million people in Turkey or that drought would dry up the groundwater and diminish the rivers’ flow. Or that climate change would make everything worse. Or that the Turks would attempt to re-engineer the two greatest rivers of their country, thereby forever altering their river-basin ecosystems and often depriving their downstream neighbours of the water they had taken as their right.
The Fertile Crescent is getting drier. For seven years starting in 2003, a pair of US scientific satellites measured the fresh water they found beneath them. The satellites, called GRACE, an oddly elegant acronym for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, didn’t measure the water directly but the effect water had on the patch of earth where it was found — or not found. “It’s like having a giant scale in the sky,” said one of the lead investigators, Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at University of California, Irvine. When GRACE peers downward, it can measure how strong the gravity is. Within a given river basin, rising and falling water reserves subtly alter the earth’s mass, and thus how strong the local gravitational attraction is. By doing these measurements over time, changes in the water mass can be quantified and compared. “It is the only way we can estimate groundwater from space right now,” Famiglietti said. With it, however, fairly close estimates can be made.12
GRACE found that from 2003 to 2010, the Tigris and Euphrates basins lost 144 cubic kilometres of water, an amount equivalent in volume to the Dead Sea. It is, Famiglietti told NASA, “An alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on earth, after India.” Groundwater tables were dropping at thirty centimetres a year throughout the period measured. “The rate [of the drop] was especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise and the region does not coordinate its water management because of different interpretations of international laws.”13
The amount of water, enough to provide a steady supply for ten million people for a decade or more, was lost through over-pumping: in 2007 alone, the Iraqi government drilled a thousand new high-volume wells just to counter the shortfall in rain. No one knows how many more private landowners drilled wells of their own, but it was almost certainly just as many again. The abstraction rate has been more than four times the replenishment rate. And the water situation in the region will only get worse as climate change advances.
The Tigris and Euphrates systems are as stressed as the aquifers. All the governments concerned have built massive dams, containment basins, and networks of pipes. No comprehensive treaties or management documents have been signed, on the airy assumption that all would continue as before. This looks increasingly unlikely. As Famiglietti told the Economist, “The region is ready for collaborating on the science of water management. Whether it is ready for an international legal framework, I have no idea.”14
Both rivers rise in the moisture-rich mountains of eastern Anatolian Turkey. The Tigris flows southeast, crossing low mountain valleys and the rolling Turkish plains, briefly becomes the border with Syria, and then heads, still southeast, through Iraq, passing through Baghdad and more or less skirting the Central Marshes before joining with the Euphrates. For its part, the Euphrates takes a rather more circular route, starting near the Black Sea and making a southwesterly curve through a series of lakes before crossing into Syria. From there it too heads southeast, crosses into Iraq, traverses the desert south of Baghdad, and skirts the Hammar Marshes to the south — or what would be the Hammar Marshes if Saddam Hussein hadn’t (mostly) drained them in his genocidal hunt for Kurds. For Syria, the Euphrates is the main water source. Iraq is dependent on both. Turkey, where the rivers rise, considers their water to be its property and stoutly maintains that it is for Turkey alone to manage their flow before it leaves the country, historical rights and prior use be damned.
This attitude has led to GAP, the Southeastern Anatolia Project, one of the most ambitious water basin development schemes on the planet and certainly the largest on an international river that is progressing without the say-so of the other parties. When completed, it will comprise twenty-two dams and an attendant network of irrigation canals, weirs, and barrages on a multitude of rivers that will irrigate 1.7 million hectares of currently non-irrigated land. Experts who have studied the project say that, when completed and while it is all filling, Syria’s take from the Euphrates would drop almost 40 percent, and Syria currently does not have the resources or the energy to fight the Turks in addition to their many internal enemies. Iraq would lose almost all of its current Euphrates withdrawals, though at least it still has the Tigris to fall back on.
Syria’s “unrest” (an awful euphemism to describe a country that is rapidly falling into a state of barbarism) is “in the most direct sense, a reaction to a brutal and out-of-touch regime,” as a report for Washington’s Center for American Progress put it. “However, that’s not the whole story. The past few years have seen a number of significant social, economic, environmental and climatic changes in Syria that have eroded the social contract between citizen and government.” By this the authors meant the drought that lasted from 2006 to 2011 and drove literally millions off their land.15
Those droughts are getting worse, and the country is ill-equipped to deal with them.
Saudi Arabia, a country without a river basin of its own, may seem to have nothing much to do with the Nile and its basin, but it does. In an ongoing act of ecological vandalism, around thirty years ago, the Saudis decided they needed to be self-sufficient in staple grains such as wheat. To do this, they needed water, and the only water available was deep underground. Being expert drillers, they tapped into the aquifer and within a decade had a flourishing irrigated agricultural zone — and became self-sufficient in wheat, just as promised. But only for a while: by 2010, the water was gone and was not being replenished. So the Saudis turned to virtual water instead. Since they had money to spare, they started buying farmland in Ethiopia and Sudan, where they could grow wheat with someone else’s water. Soon they found themselves in competition with the Chinese, who were doing the same thing.
In both Sudan and Ethiopia, there seemed to be water to spare — the Nile flows through both countries (and the Blue Nile rises in Ethiopia). But tapping into that water had another consequence: it diminished, or threatened to diminish, the Nile water available to Egypt. And the Egyptians really have no other source except for some fossil aquifers of their own. Egypt regards any threat to its Nile water allocation as a justified cause of war, and early in 2013, belligerent noises were being heard on all sides.
Those belligerent rumblings have a long history, dating back in some senses to the Pharaohs. But it wasn’t until the British became the colonial masters of the Nile basin that they had any real focus — not until dams were contemplated along the Nile’s length that would alter the flow and amount of water reaching downstream countries. And Egypt, of course, is last in line.
The British were also the first to contemplate treating the basin as a single entity. The precipitating event was a shortage of cotton on the world market and Britain’s desire for Egypt and Sudan, then colonies, to pitch in to help remedy this. It would take perennial irrigation to bring off, and the Nile’s traditional flood-fed methods just wouldn’t do. Squabbles ensued inside the Colonial Office in London between Egyptian and Sudanese specialists as to where, exactly, this development should take place, upstream or down. By 1904, British engineers had reached Sudan’s Sudd Marshes, where the Nile water pauses for a while before resuming its northward flow. The plan was to punch a canal through the marshes, thereby eliminating a lazy S bend in the river, and back in Cairo, plans were drawn up to regulate the river’s full flow. To bring this off, they sought, vainly, to sign an agreement with the still-independent Ethiopians stating that the Blue Nile would not be tampered with. It wasn’t until 1929 that they were able to impose the Nile Waters Agreement, which sought to apportion the Nile water among riparian countries and colonies. Egypt was guaranteed forty-eight billion cubic metres a year, out of an estimated average flow of eighty-four billion cubic metres a year. Seasonal variance was around 25 percent, and Egypt was also guaranteed all of this “timely flow,” which meant that the Egyptian lobby in London had won. Sudan would be able to grow cotton only in the summer months, while Egypt could do so whenever it wanted. The treaty also guaranteed that no “works” would be developed anywhere along the river’s flow without Egyptian acquiescence. The Ethiopians were not consulted and were not a party to this agreement.
After Egyptian and Sudanese independence, this treaty was revisited and a new agreement was signed in 1959, the Agreement for the Full Utilization of the Nile Waters, which essentially reaffirmed the earlier one. The river’s average flow was still at eighty-four billion cubic metres a year, though it was now acknowledged that evaporation reduced this by ten billion or so, leaving seventy-four billion to be allocated. Egypt was still guaranteed its forty-eight billion, and Sudan only four billion, with the surplus divided one-third to Egypt and two-thirds to Sudan. Once again, Ethiopia was not consulted.
This treaty is still in force. Ethiopia has several times said it would go its own way and that what it did with the Blue Nile waters within its territory was no one else’s business. Plagued with civil wars and then governed by a radical Marxist government that had no time for development, only repression, Ethiopia did little for decades. But the eventual settlement of Ethiopia’s internal war and the destruction of its Derg tyrants raised alarm in Egypt. So did the fact that the new government of Meles Zenawi seemed both confident and determined — and willing to look to China for financing. Egypt under Mubarak was able to bully Western financial agencies from financing anything that would threaten its interests, but the Chinese proved impervious.
Early in 2013, the Ethiopians began diverting a stretch of the Blue Nile to allow construction of a massive six-thousand-megawatt hydro dam (the Great Ethiopian Renaissance dam, to give the thing its grandiose formal title) near the Sudanese border, to vociferous protests from downstream. The Renaissance dam is only one of many planned. Sudan and Ethiopia between them have no fewer than twenty-five new dams on the drawing boards, all aimed at protecting water security, generating electricity, and boosting food production. Egypt and Sudan both complained that the dam would violate the Nile treaty that essentially guaranteed them 90 percent of the Nile’s water, ignoring the fact that no Ethiopian signature was to be found anywhere on the document. “The dam will cause no harm to anyone,” Ethiopia’s water ministry declared. Egypt’s president, the now-jailed Mohammed Morsi, begged to differ: “As president of the republic, I confirm to you that all options are open,” he said. “If Egypt is the Nile’s gift, then the Nile is a gift to Egypt. . . . If it diminishes by one drop, then our blood is the alternative.” In return, Dina Mufti, spokesman for Ethiopia’s foreign ministry, said his country was “not intimidated by Egypt’s psychological warfare, and won’t halt the dam’s construction, even for seconds.”16
In 2014, the belligerent noises mercifully subsided. There have even been indications from the new military government in Egypt that it is amenable to a significant shift in attitude, from considering Nile water “theirs” to more or less accepting the idea that the Nile is an African river with regional ownership and that cooperation would benefit everyone. Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, sent his foreign minister to Addis Ababa, who returned to announce “a new phase of our relationship, based on mutual understanding, mutual respect and a recognition that the Nile binds us.” A report on the dam’s impact has not been publicly released, but the Ethiopians have declared it supports their notion of the dam’s minimal impact. Water ministers from both countries repudiated Morsi’s “all options are open” stance. “Previous statements were made in the heat of the moment,” as Egypt’s foreign minister put it. For his part, the Ethiopian foreign minister put it this way: “We have two options, either to swim or sink together. I think Ethiopia chooses, and so does Egypt, to swim together.”
No water war, then. At least not yet. The good news is that the Nile basin, for all its potential for conflict, has been — and still is — a locus of cooperation and agreement. Sometimes reluctant, and sometimes cooperation with sotto voce rumblings, yes, but it still counts as a success.
For more than a decade, the notion that Yemen may be the first country in the world to run out of water has been a cliché among hydrologists. A cliché but not a joke: the most optimistic projections are that the capital Sana’a will run out entirely in a decade, by which time its population will be peaking at more than four million. Where are they to go, these new water refugees? The forlorn hopes of the country’s rulers rest on desalination, which is possible but for which there is no money, or — a more desperate scheme — on moving the capital to the coast. That would cost somewhere around $40 billion at best guess, and money is increasingly scarce — two-thirds of national revenue comes from rapidly diminishing oil reserves. Not that it would help much to move to the coast; water is short there too.
It obviously complicates matters that Yemen’s governments come and go as reliably as winters, and that the country was overrun by a Shiite Houthi rebellion (the Houthi movement is named after its leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi) in early 2015, a state of affairs that devastated the country’s major cities like Aden, expanded to a full-scale civil war, and threatened to erupt into a wider regional war between proxies for Saudi Sunnis and Iranian Shiites.
The country’s central highlands, once the locus of a flourishing coffee industry, has seen its wells drying up and its remaining aquifers dropping sharply, leaving residents to fight for jerry cans of water from private water sellers, most of whom buy their water from illegal wells and resell it at grotesque markups. In the west of the country, along the coastal mountains, where there was once a flourishing agricultural zone that exported pomegranates and grapes, the Radaa basin aquifer has run dry and the country’s most obvious export is now disaffected young men, recruits for al Qaeda and its more sinister offspring. Of the country’s fifteen known aquifers, only two are anywhere near self-sustaining. What dams exist tend to leak, and when the rains do come, such as the heavy downpours and flooding in 2010, virtually none of the water is captured and stored. In some highland cities, the taps now run for only one day a month, and residents must store as much as they can in the time available — which has led to widespread water theft and revenge-motivated vandalism. The country’s interior ministry confirmed in 2013 that water-related disputes were already causing more than four thousand deaths every year as predatory bands descended on ill-defended villages to steal what water they could find — far more deaths than occurred in the many al Qaeda attacks over the last few decades.
And yet 90 percent of Yemen’s water is used for agriculture and almost half of that is used to grow khat, a mild narcotic and a known water hog. Khat has displaced what used to be food crops, causing food prices to spike, with resulting food riots.17
Wells are supposed to be a monopoly of the state, but sharia law, the basis of Yemeni jurisprudence, allows private wells on private property, so quasi-legal wells abound — about two-thirds of Sana’a’s residents get their water from illegal wells, most of which have become contaminated as the city’s sewage seeps into the groundwater. Government ministers, notoriously, all have deep wells in their houses.
There is nothing natural about Yemen’s water crisis. It is almost entirely man-made.
On the face of it, water relations between India and Pakistan represent a triumph of diplomacy: the two neighbours, both nuclear armed and often much too ready for battle, signed a treaty in 1960 governing the water of the Indus basin, and despite three shooting wars, dozens of terrorism incidents, and seemingly unending violent rhetoric, the treaty is still holding.
It has been a near thing.
Water of the Indus basin is the main issue. The Indus is a river of considerable size — three times the size of the Tigris-Euphrates system and as big as two Niles. The basin is also the home of one of the oldest irrigation areas on the planet.
The partition of the country into Pakistan and India by the departing British also divided the Indus basin, Pakistan getting most of the irrigated lands and distribution canals, but with India, as the upstream power, controlling the flow. As well as the Indus itself, all three of the major tributaries, the Sutlej, the Beas, and the Ravi, flow from India into Pakistan, two of them forming the national frontier for several hundred kilometres. Since Pakistan depends on irrigation for 80 percent of its food, this arrangement is an obvious source of tension.
Independence from the British came in 1947, and the first belligerent action over Indus waters occurred less than a year later. The trigger was a unilateral action by the India state of East Punjab, which, finding itself short of irrigation water, cut off the flow to West Punjab in Pakistan, something it did without warning and without consulting its own federal government. The Pakistani prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, expressed his country’s fury in a stiff telegram to his Indian counterpart, Jawaharlal Nehru, who replied in kind, his newly independent hackles up. The brouhaha continued until prudence was finally exercised and an international conference announced. A decade went by without a formal agreement, but at least the water was flowing again. Finally, in 1960, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, as the World Bank was then called, brokered an agreement, assigning the eastern rivers of the basin — the Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi — to India, and the western rivers, the Indus itself, the Jhelum, and the Chenab, to Pakistan.
This is the treaty that is still in force, sixty-four years later.
Despite this long history of cautious non-belligerence, cross-border amity started to fray again in the second decade of the new century. There were many causes but chief among them was ongoing drought — and India’s determination to build run-of-the-river hydro schemes on two of “Pakistan’s” rivers, the Chenab and the Jhelum. Allegations soon followed in the Pakistani press that India was bent on stealing Pakistan’s water, and, at the same time, accusing India of causing severe flooding along the Chenab itself. In a long interview with the newspaper Dawn, the Pakistani commissioner for Indus waters, Mirza Asif Baig, sought to tamp things down. No, India is not stealing water — “Some pseudo-water experts are spreading this notion. India will never do so because it would lose face globally. Our own response will not be subdued if it happens.” Yes, less water was flowing in the Chenab, he said, but only partly because India has constructed new irrigation zones — Pakistan has done the same thing. Yes, India is building hydro schemes on the rivers, but this is allowed under the treaty — it was the design of the project, not the projects themselves, that was causing difficulties. Yes, India built a dam called Kishanganga to which Pakistan objected — but international arbitration came down on the Indian side. No, we shouldn’t scrap the treaty and seek a newer one. That would create too much uncertainty. A few tinkerings here and there wouldn’t hurt, though.18 His federal counterpart, the state minister for water and power, was not so positive. Chaudhry Abid Sher Ali directly blamed India for Pakistan’s shortages — too many dams and hydro projects on rivers flowing into Pakistan, he said, could spell catastrophe for Pakistan. With water shortages looming, he urged his government to start building more dams of its own.
The real reason for mistrust, though, had nothing really to do with India and everything to do with Pakistani mismanagement, itself driven by corruption, sectarian violence, tribal squabbles, and increasing poverty. In the last forty years, Pakistan has built only two large storage dams, and those are already in trouble through excessive silt. In the same period, India built four thousand new dams — and China an astonishing twenty-two thousand. Pakistan’s few dams store only about a 30-day supply; India’s, a 120-day supply. No groundwater recharge schemes exist in the country, though it is well known that Indus water will likely diminish over time because of less glacial melt. Almost three-quarters of water used for agriculture flows in only three months of the year; without dams, the rest runs unused to the sea. Farming still employs about half of all Pakistanis and accounts for about a quarter of GDP, yet no plans exist for water conservation. It is still common for those Pakistanis who do have access to good piped water to leave the taps running all night because they find it soothing. Overall, Pakistan has only one thousand cubic metres per capita per year to spare, about the same as Ethiopia, down from five thousand cubic metres in 1947, and is defined by the Asian Development Bank as one of the most water-stressed countries in the world. A rapidly growing population is partly to blame for the reduction — there are already 190 million people in the country, two-thirds of them under age thirty, and the number will likely rise to 256 million by 2030.
A Pakistani water expert, Munawar Sabir of the University of the Punjab, had this to say: “Our agricultural input has decreased, annual floods have become routine, and in 2013 alone, more than 178 people have been killed. The infant mortality rate is high because of contaminated water. Water resources of both [India and Pakistan] are eventually sharply depleting, amounting to dangerous levels.”19 Water pollution makes it worse: the capital, Karachi, now contains about eighteen million people, and more than half of them are obliged to drink unsafe water. Typhoid, cholera, dysentery and hepatitis are common.
The Pakistani newspaper Dawn had this to say in an editorial in 2013:
This [water crisis] has led many — from farmers to opposition politicians to ministers to jihadi groups — to blame India . . . for Pakistan’s water crunch. . . . It isn’t without reason that some experts have warned of water wars in South Asia, one of the world’s most water-stressed regions. . . . The country’s population is predicted to double by 2050, meaning that the people will have access to just half the water in 2050 they have now even if they start using the available resource efficiently and climatic changes don’t reduce flows in the Indus river system. . . . The situation can still be salvaged. But it’ll require efficient use of water, the development of more storage capacity, resolution of provincial water disputes as well as engagement with India to find a peaceful solution to trans-boundary water-sharing. . . . Unless effective actions are taken now, the future appears grim.20
Punjab University’s Sabir thinks it may not be quite that grim. Enough water exists, if it is used carefully and properly conserved, he says. Michael Kugelman, a fellow for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center, adds: “The root of the problem . . . [is that] water is often misallocated and wasted. This all gives the illusion of scarcity. In both countries, better demand-side management would resolve the water crisis.”
But better management may be hard to come by. Especially when Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Pakistani militant group that was behind terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, issues a statement against “India’s water terrorism,” and declares that “water flows, or blood.”21
No fewer than fifty-four rivers are shared between India and Bangladesh, and all of them are stressed. The main ones are the Ganges-Brahmaputra system and its tributaries, especially the Teesta, the subject of increasing acrimony.
Here’s the basic geography: most of the flow of the Ganges, holy river of the Hindus, originates in India’s Himalayas, but about a third comes from Nepal and China. It traverses the Ganges flood plain, briefly becomes the border between India and Bangladesh, and passes wholly into Bangladesh, where it is renamed Padma. The Brahmaputra rises in China and circles around eastern Bhutan before briefly passing through India and into Bangladesh, where it is called the Jamuna, before joining the Padma and emptying into the Bay of Bengal. The Teesta, for its part, rises in the Indian territory of Sikkim and flows through the northern fringes of West Bengal before crossing into Bangladesh and merging with the Jamuna. Jointly, the basins of the three systems comprise only a fraction of one percent of the earth’s landmass, but they contain about 10 percent of the planet’s population. The plains are wonderfully fertile, the rivers consistent, yet most of the people are poor.
The politics are messier than this straightforward description would indicate. Just as with Pakistan, disputes over the river-basin allocations date back almost to independence, in 1947, when Bangladesh was still the Eastern Province of Pakistan. The Indians, again, started it. Their port city of Calcutta, as it was then called (now Kolkata), was in danger of silting up because not enough water was flowing down the Hooghly River to flush the silt into the sea. India therefore said it would build a barrage across the Ganges in the Bengali region of Farakka, close to the border with Pakistan. From there, water would flow through a canal into the Hooghly, desilting Calcutta’s harbour, or so it was hoped. East Pakistan, dependent on the two main rivers for water, inevitably protested to no avail. The Indians went ahead anyway, and construction started in 1962.
Three years later, the two countries fought the first of three Indo-Pakistan wars, complicated by the rise of a vociferous separatist movement in East Pakistan. In 1971, Pakistan’s Eastern Province became the new country Bangladesh, and since India had been covertly helping the separatists, it seemed that an amicable settlement of the Farakka dispute would follow.
It was not to be so simple.
The rise of Islamic militancy on the one hand and Hindu fundamentalism on the other meant that for domestic reasons, neither side could afford to be too accommodating. Both sides stalled and it wasn’t until 1974 that a cautious “interim” agreement was signed, allowing India to build its barrage to divert around four hundred cubic metres per second into the Hooghly and thence to Calcutta. Both sides, it turned out, hated the agreement: India because it didn’t get the a thousand cubic metres Calcutta said it needed, and Bangladesh because its leader, Mujibur Rahman, appeared weak and overly concerned with Indian sensibilities. Rahman was assassinated a few years later and the water agreement was thought to be the main cause.
For another decade, not much happened. Finally, in 1992, the two governments sent delegations to a conciliation meeting, but both sides departed angrier than they had arrived. India’s Farakka diversions continued. In 1996, a Bangladeshi government report measured the flow at Hardinge Bridge and found it had shrunk from 1,740 cubic metres per second to only 362, drying up the Gorai River on which southwestern Bangladesh depended for its water. It was a surprise to everyone, then, when both countries signed a formal Ganges Water Sharing Agreement in 1997 that laid out a complicated water-sharing regime whose key was to ensure that Bangladesh got a minimum of 833 cubic metres per second in the driest part of the year, from March to May. It was supposed to be a thirty-year agreement, meaning it would have to be renegotiated in 2027.
The Teesta River, though, has complicated things. A separate agreement had been reached over its water in 1983 in which India was allocated 39 percent and Bangladesh 36 percent of the river’s flow. A formal treaty giving each side 48 percent (the rest was for the natural flow) was supposed to be signed in 2013, but there was a hitch: Mamata Banerjee, the newly elected chief minister of West Bengal State, balked — the river’s flow had been sharply reduced through a recent drought, and in her view sending water downstream to the Bangladeshis would unfairly penalize her state. Besides, Sikkim, where the river originated, had already built five dams on its upper reaches and was planning thirty-one more, making things incrementally more precarious. Banerjee was sharply critical of her own federal government. At a rally before her election, she declared that “the central government is giving away the Teesta water, depriving the people of West Bengal of their rights,” and urged everyone to “teach them a lesson at the ballot box.”22 Of course, they did teach them a lesson, throwing out the Congress Party and electing Narendra Modi, himself a former state first minister (Gujarat), a Hindu nationalist and a strong believer in states’ rights, which in India include water. By 2014, it still seemed unlikely that Modi would want to jeopardize relations with a strongly nationalist region by reaching an agreement with foreigners — and Islamic foreigners to boot. When he was in New York in September 2014, Modi met with his Bangladesh counterpart, Sheikh Hasina, and was reported to have said he would “look into it” and that it would be “just a matter of time.” “Looking into it” will almost certainly have to wait until 2016, when West Bengal goes to the polls again.23
Despite all this, in non-water matters, relations between the two countries are as cordial as can be expected and hostilities are not likely.
One good sign is that several companies have set up tourist cruises on the section of the Teesta River that passes through Assam, once the locus of violent insurgencies. “This is an India very few [outside] people have seen,” Nirmalya Choudhury, manager of operations at Assam Bengal Navigation Company, said, with commendable understatement. “The pleasure of meeting local people who welcome foreigners with an open smile cannot be explained in words.”24
As discussed earlier, China is planning a multitude of new dams on the Salween River, called the Nu in China, without consulting its riparian neighbours, mostly Myanmar and Thailand. The Salween, at 2,413 kilometres, has so far managed to remain the longest undammed river in Southeast Asia. That’s about to change, and not just on the Chinese side: both Myanmar and Thailand, with Japanese development help, have undertaken “feasibility studies” for new hydro projects, and development pressure in the basin, home to and livelihood for thirteen million people and thirteen ethnic groups, is edging upward. No formal agreement on the Salween exists, and experts say the development plans of the three nations are not always compatible. China, by far the largest, richest, and strongest country, is acting unilaterally, threatening to divert as much as 10 percent of the river’s flow for its own purposes, and there are fears that release of sediment-rich water from the dams would damage fisheries and erode banks where farmers cultivate rice.
Downstream, there is somewhat more amity. The Thais need water — the northeast of the country has been suffering shortages, caused mostly by deforestation, and the country has essentially dammed all the rivers it can. The Myanmar military junta has indicated it wants to cooperate with Thailand, mostly because it needs more electrical power and wants Thai money to help it acquire what it needs. The mechanism is a set of five hydro dams just short of the Thai border; studies say they could produce thirty-four hundred megawatts of electricity, a quarter of which would be allocated to Myanmar, with Thailand purchasing the rest at an agreed price. There has been ethnic unrest in the area — the Myanmar military has been hounding the civilian population in Shan State, home to a militant insurgency violently opposed to the government in Rangoon, and the dams would be vulnerable to sabotage. But the agreement, with the Thais clearly holding their noses, stands pending financing.
Actual water conflict is unlikely. Growing water stress, peasant revolts, and ethnic strife are more probable.
When in the fall of 2012 the unloved leader of the gas-rich but water-poor republic of Uzbekistan threatened his neighbours, also rump states of the former Soviet Union (Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan) with armed conflict, he was carrying on a lamentable tradition dating from the dying days of the USSR. Still, Islam Karimov was unusually forthright: Uzbekistan, central Asia’s most populous country, depends for its precious water on rivers that rise in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and anything that threatens that resource would precipitate conflict, he declared. He was referring mostly to his upstream neighbours’ desire to revive the massive hydroelectric schemes proposed by Soviet planners and largely abandoned in the aftermath of the USSR’s dissolution. In particular, he singled out Tajikistan’s Rogun dam, a multibillion project on the Vakhsh River, itself a tributary of the Amu Darya. It was “started” in 1967 but remained unfinished in 2014, pending a slowly moving World Bank assessment. If it is ever completed, it will be the world’s highest dam, a full 335 metres of rock and rubble and concrete slurry built in an earthquake-prone region with millions living downstream. (Not much smaller is the already completed Nurek dam, on the same river.) As reported by Reuters correspondent Raushan Nurshayeva, Karimov was sarcastic and caustic: “They’re going for the Guinness world record, it would seem, but we’re talking here about the lives of millions of people who cannot live without water. These projects were devised in the 70s and 80s, when we were all living in the Soviet Union and suffering from megalomania, but times change.” Then, in a nudge to World Bank assessors, he suggested that “hydropower structures today should be built on a different basis entirely.” Tajik government officials, said Nurshayeva, “were not available for comment.”25
This sorry tale starts with Soviet planners in the Cold War era, when desk-thumping Nikita Khrushchev promised he would “bury” the West by outperforming it in every way, including in the very area for which the Soviet Union was most laggard, food production. To do this, the USSR was going to create a new world breadbasket in the Virgin Lands of central Asia.
Instead, it caused the ecological catastrophe that is the Aral Sea.
Or rather, was the Aral Sea, because the Virgin Lands were ill-suited to any kind of large irrigation schemes, as would soon become painfully clear.
Not that anyone cared at that point. The Aral is fed by two rivers, the Amu and the Syr, which rise in the Tien Shan and Pamir mountain ranges of the Himalayas and flow northward through their alluvial valleys and the Kara Kum and Kyzyl Kum Deserts before emptying into the Aral, one into the southern tip and the other into the northern. These two rivers are the only real source of fresh water in a system that comprises one and a half million square kilometres and (in 2010) somewhere around sixty million people. In 1956, the Soviet agricultural commissar opened the Kara Kum Canal and began diverting water from the Aral. Soon, both rivers were diverted into the new farming zones in the Uzbek and Kazakh deserts, irrigating more millions of hectares, and the flow into the Aral dropped by more than half and then stopped altogether.
What happened subsequently is well enough known. The little fishing village of Muynak, soon to be a poster child for ecological horrors, was an island in the Amu Darya Delta in 1956. By 1962, it was a peninsula. By 1970, the sea was ten kilometres away and the village was abandoned. Ten years later, the nearest water was forty kilometres away, and by the turn of the millennium, it was seventy-five. In 2014, to complete the mess, the eastern basin dried up completely. Half-hearted attempts by the Uzbeks and the Kazakhs to resurrect yet another Soviet conceptual folly (turning the great Siberian rivers southward to water the Aral basin) never got any traction.
The Aral’s most recent chapter began in 2005, when the World Bank, with some reluctance but under strong pressure, granted Kazakhstan a $68 million credit to build a thirteen-kilometre dam across the northern tip of the former sea, thereby cutting it into two lobes, a small Kazakh one to the north and a larger Uzbek one to the south. At the same time, the Kazakhs restored some of the Syr River flow and their small part of the Aral began slowly to fill. By 2008, miraculously, a small fishing industry resumed as the salinity levels in the northern lobe dwindled. To the south, however, the Uzbeks had no water to divert — it was all still being used to irrigate the cotton industry, one of the country’s major exports.
Tensions remain. The Uzbeks, with no water of their own, have a finely tuned sense of water paranoia (they have on occasion accused Tajikistan of exporting disease in the guise of fresh water, a notion encouraged by Tajik bandits who have raised the possibility themselves). Early in this century, the Uzbeks admitted to hatching a scheme to invade Turkmenistan in an effort to control its water. Mostly, these tensions have subsided into low growling but not much else, except over the Rogun dam.
On a positive note, if agriculture is fixed (shifted to less water-hungry crops) and infrastructure improved, there is water enough for everyone — the region is well above the sixteen hundred cubic metres per person that is the benchmark for water stress — indeed, more water is available per person than in Denmark, for example. The countries in the region remain among the highest users of water anywhere: a Turkmen consumes four times as much water as an American, and thirteen times more than a Chinese — leaving obvious room for improvement. This wastefulness is not helped much by grandiose projects such as Turkmenistan’s Golden Age Lake, which will draw already scarce water from the Amu Darya to fill a “lake” in the desert as “a symbol of national pride.”26 Still, there are some signs of improvement. By 2012, water partnerships and local committees had helped raise water productivity by 30 percent. If that progress is extended, the region could become a model similar to that of the Nile, with amity prevailing instead of conflict, promises instead of threats. Uzbekistan could sell gas for energy to Tajikistan instead of threatening to cut it off; the Tajiks could, in return, ensure downstream water supplies.
Good sense could well break out.
Another leftover squabble from Soviet times involves the Kura-Araks River basin in the South Caucasus region between Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The main issue here is pollution, rather than supply. A report on the region suggested that progress in arriving at water-management programs has been slow, “but a foundation is being established for future work between the nations when they are ready.” Don’t hold your breath. Armenia and Azerbaijan have been in a state of armed hostility since 1988, and even more so since 1991, when bloody conflict erupted over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, leading to a land grab by Armenia that still holds, despite a 1994 ceasefire. It is hard to talk about water when land is the dominant issue.
The Azeris, as the Azerbaijanis are called, lack groundwater resources of their own and are dependent on the Kura-Araks River flow, and complain frequently about pollution from upstream neighbours entering the country. No one pays any attention, but the pollution really is severe. The Kura-Araks is pregnant with chemical, industrial, biological, agricultural, and even radioactive pollutants, and what wastewater treatments once existed have collapsed.
Still, early in the century, a meeting was held in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, at which representatives from all three governments showed up, along with NGOs, environmental agencies, scientists, and EU facilitators, who all agreed to work toward a common approach. The non-binding resolution signed by all concerned “took into consideration” notions such as supporting a culture of sustainable water use, improving exchanges of information about water, developing an environmental strategy about hazardous materials being dumped into the river, and developing a transboundary water plan.
There are copies of the resolution in all three capitals.
It’s a start.
By the standards of these watersheds, water conflicts elsewhere are minimal, and the flashpoints a lot less flashy.
Measured against the problems in Yemen, the Middle East, central Asia, and much of North Africa, Europe’s water stresses are moderate, at worst. This is not to say they are absent, and hydrologists are now commonly using the phrase the “Africanization of Europe” to denote increasing shortages and increasing risks of conflict. It’s a term that annoys politicians in Europe’s relatively arid south who thinks it exaggerates their problems, and also Africans who resent the use of the word “Africa” as a synonym for awful.
It’s true that a third of European countries have relatively low availability (less than five thousand cubic metres per person per year), with the most stressed countries in the south; it is true that 20 percent of European countries depend on water from a neighbouring country; it is true that 140 million Europeans live in or near areas of groundwater overexploitation (and that two-thirds of Europeans depend on groundwater for their daily use); it is true that the average losses from creaky infrastructure are around 30 percent, and much higher — up to 70 percent — in many urban areas; it is true that 5 percent of Europe’s wetlands have disappeared in just the last few decades; and, of course, it is also true that Europeans have waged war on each other as long as there has been a Europe. But still, Europe has the money and the politics and the technology to mitigate stresses where they appear, and in most places they are also getting policy right, pricing water for conservation. Various European agencies are beginning to contest industry’s right to extract as much water as it wants to use — not through rationing but through pricing. Some farming will probably face the same pressure in the near future.
What conflicts have existed tend to be internal and tend to be in the south, where water is scarcest. In the south and southeast of Spain, for example, along the Costa Brava and the coast around Murcia, there have been clashes between farmers, whose water has been diminishing, and the developers of the golf-course-strewn, swimming-pool-laden resorts built for the holiday benefit of northerners. This has been complicated further by political payoffs and corruption (golf-course owners around Murcia have been declaring their fairways a “crop” in order to qualify for an agriculture allocation, Elizabeth Rosenthal reported in 2008).27 As we discussed earlier, Barcelona, which really isn’t in the south, had to briefly resort to tankering in water to help fill a reservoir, a futile exercise soon abandoned. Already parts of Spain are turning to desert. Groundwater has been depleted by hundreds of illegal wells, and water transfers from the north have been reduced because the north too is drying up. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed that Spain has only a third as much water per capita as Portugal, which gets much of its water from rivers that cross the border from Spain.
Still, even in Spain there has been progress. Barcelona, spooked by the shortages in the recent drought, has improved its water efficiency. Madrid even more so — consumption in the capital has dropped 25 percent through better water conservation, saving (as the European Environment Agency points out approvingly) the equivalent of a reservoir providing over one hundred million cubic metres a year.
For the rest, most of Europe’s water issues stem from pollution, not supply, and we’ve already discussed those. And other issues that are beyond the purview of this book: rising sea levels threatening low-lying areas, for example.
In North America, apart from the purely internal issue of confronting shortages caused by careless overuse and drought, transboundary issues are minimal. The two residual nagging issues are allocating the shrinking waters of the Rio Grande on the Mexican-US border, and, along the Canadian border, the vexed notion of America’s perceived need for Canada’s water, as mentioned briefly in Chapter 8.
In neither place will there be a water war.
Andrew Nikiforuk, a skillful and thoughtful journalist and observer of matters environmental, had this to say in a 2007 paper: “Make no mistake, Canada’s water — through diversion, transfer, sale, trade or all of the above — is on the negotiating table in Canada/US relations. While water is not necessarily the top item of negotiation, and at times is dormant as an issue, it is there. In the long-term agenda within the context of freer trade and increased North American integration, Canada’s water is up for grabs. As long as its status as a negotiable resource remains unclear, pressure to access Canada’s water will continue to grow ever stronger.”28
Because he is a thoughtful journalist and not prone to hyperbole, one must perforce take him seriously. Nevertheless, this notion that Canadian water is somehow up for grabs is overwrought, and wrong in its essence.
It is wrong for two reasons. One is the erroneous notion that “the Americans” speak with one voice. They don’t. It’s not hard to come up with examples of Americans who think Canada’s clinging to water ownership is peculiarly regressive (the authors of Water Markets, for example, arguing for “freely tradable water rights” across the US-Canada border, which “will be accomplished best by a careful relinquishment of national or state sovereignty sufficient to create rights enforcement institutions which are free from the distorting influence of national, provincialism and political competition”). Well, good luck with that. The same writers seem puzzled that Canadians seem “willing for forego possible benefits of water trading opportunities that may be available under NAFTA.” This goes to show the degree to which policy wonks can be remarkably ignorant of political realities.29 But there are plenty of people, many of them influential and in positions of authority, who subscribe to the basic ecological principle that “water should be kept within its natural basin, treated with respect, and used efficiently” (a phrasing suggested by Adèle Hurley, director of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affair’s Program on Water Issues, in her introduction to Nikiforuk’s paper). The second reason is that the United States has enough water of its own despite the drought ravaging the Southwest, and that is not likely to change: the Pacific Northwest and the Atlantic Northeast are both likely to get wetter as climate change advances and so are parts of the Midwest. You might say that the American Southwest would find it easier to bully British Columbia into sharing its water than, say, Oregon, but either one is politically improbable.
At the other end of the United States, matters are worse. The Rio Grande has been in trouble for decades and is not improving. It is the fifth longest river in North America; from its source in the Rockies, it travels a little more than twenty-nine hundred kilometres and drops around three kilometres before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. It passes through three states in the United States (Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas) and five states in Mexico (Chihuahua, Durango, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas). From El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, a distance of about two thousand kilometres, the river is the international frontier. Its watershed is massive, about 870,000 square kilometres, about 11 percent of the area of the continental United States. But for a good part of its run, it passes through the Chihauhauan Desert, where there are no tributaries to replenish it, and intense demand has over the years depleted it until, by the year 2000, the river no longer flowed all the way. American cities and users have extracted every drop from the river by the time it reaches El Paso, Texas, and the river doesn’t resume flowing until the confluence with the Rio Conchos, four hundred kilometres downstream. The Conchos and its tributaries rise in Mexico, and so the lower reaches of the Rio Grande consist almost entirely of Mexican water.
NAFTA made things worse. Instead of locating industry in better-watered regions to the south, Mexico concentrated its efforts in northern areas close to the US border, leading directly to the industrialization of deserts, a folly as great as California’s. As we have seen, most of the country’s aquifers are already seriously depleted and the country as a whole, despite the relatively verdant south (and Yucatan), is under high water stress.
The stresses are going to get worse. But there won’t be a water war. Both sides know that would be futile.