Watering down reality

“Water water, everywhere
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere
Nor any drop to drink”

There was certainly much talk about water everywhere at the recent Fourth World Water Forum, a bureaucratic get together of industry-reps, government ministers, NGOs, bankers and journalists that takes place every three years. Its corporate-friendly nature might be best expressed by the fact that the preferred provider of beverages for delegates was none other than, Coke.

There was much talk about who should provide water “services” for the undeveloped world. Should it be the efficient, modern private sector replete with its investment dollars and technical prowess? Should it be the governments of the world, backed by multilateral lending and expertise provided by international institutions? After fierce protests outside the summit, and a little media attention because of them, the forum managed a fudged deal – lip service to be paid to government action, but no real progress towards achieving it, and behind the scenes plans for further corporate involvement in global water supplies.

In the end, what the talks produced was a ministerial declaration that went out of its way to avoid affirming the human right to safe water. Instead, it placed responsibility on governments to “[promote] improved access to safe drinking water, basic sanitation, sustainable and secure tenure, and adequate shelter, through improved governance at all levels and appropriate enabling environments and regulatory frameworks, adopting a pro-poor approach and with the active involvement of all stakeholders.” In other words, no progress towards safe water for all, just a clutch of buzzwords – a collective shrugging of the shoulders.

Amongst all of this, a startling UN report slipped out, with little fanfare and even less attention paid by the media who were more interested in the private/public argument than an objective, scientific analysis of global water prospects being offered them. The Global International Waters Assessment (GIWA) subtitled “Challenges to International Waters : Regional Assessments in a Global Perspective” is exactly that – a comprehensive study of the major freshwater basins and maritime fisheries of the world, compiled with the help of 1,500 scientists. In case after case, it tells a story that the water forum skirted over, but the protestors knew. The world is becoming thirstier, with more people and dwindling resources – and the ideology of “development” is not delivering any solutions.

A few outlets did pick up GIWA as a news story, but only to pick out the most obvious points. The BBC, for example, mentioned that the report attacked subsidies for fisheries and farmlands, but countered that with the claim that, “there is mixed news on fisheries, with protection measures working in some areas of the world.” Which is true, if by mixed news you mean ninety-nine percent bad and one percent good. The coverage in other papers was minimal, and in the U.S., the report was almost completley ignored by mainstream news outlets.

Yet GIWA is a seminal document. The accumulated knowledge that it represents and the point in time that it was released make it imperative that its findings are considered.

Dammed if you do

On freshwater supplies, GIWA is sobering. At least one billion people, it explains, are currently affected by freshwater scarcity. Much of this is due, not to arbitrary drought nor climate change, but by large-scale energy infrastructure projects – generally dams – funded by the World Bank and its cousins. As it states “[the] impacts of the modification of stream flow caused by dams or river diversions were more widespread and severe than those caused by the pollution of existing supplies or changes in the water table.” In the Volga, dams have decimated the spawning routes of Sturgeon – a fish that now reproduces only in human controlled hatcheries. Dams built in India have reduced water flow into Bangladesh, reducing fish stocks, affecting agricultural productivity and causing water shortages. In the U.S., damming the Colorado River has virtually erased its delta as a wetland habitat, and has destroyed a potentially huge economic and resource – to speak a language that the proponents of such projects understand.

Large-scale dams have facilitated industrial agriculture that, according to GIWA, is the most wasteful form of water use on the planet. Agriculture uses seventy percent of global freshwater, yet only thirty percent of that makes it back into river flows. The “green revolution” has resulted in massive overexploitation of aquifers and rivers – causing the salination of coastal groundwater resources and the probably permanent depletion of inland reserves, of fossil water which “will not be refilled on human time scales.”

Once plentiful resources are now on the verge of disappearance. The Aral Sea is a well known, but tragic case – where excess diversion of water for cotton cropping has destroyed an entire ecosystem, leaving the sea floor dry. GIWA explains that, “as the Aral Sea recedes, it leaves behind chemical pesticides and natural salts which are blown into noxious dust storms, seriously affecting the health of the local people.” There have been recent reports of a slow comeback, but even so, the waters will be polluted, and fish stocks depleted. It is a metaphor for the world, but there are many more.

In the Middle East, the Dead Sea is living up to its name, with a recorded loss of over one third of its surface area and a continuing drop in its water level of one meter per year. Its waters, abstracted via dams from the rivers that feed it, profit Israeli and Jordanian farmers – with Palestinians stranded, seeing even the waters disappearing from their grasp. In fact, it is not just a problem for them. The International Water Management Institute published a study in 2000 which detailed past water scarcity and future prospects worldwide. In 1955, three Middle Eastern nations qualified and by 1990, eight. By 2025, they believe that virtually the entire region will experience “absolute water scarcity,” as severe as their rating system gets.

Powered by population growth, economic development and the divided geopolitics of the region – water scarcity has sparked resource wars and will do so again. The West Bank aquifers supply Tel Aviv. The Euphrates waters are shared by Turkey, Syria and Iraq – which incidentally has the highest water supply per capita in the region (while Israel has one of the lowest).

Then there are the by-products of industrial agriculture – pesticides and fertilizers – that are generating oxygen-depleted zones in the lakes and seas via eutrophication – which the report says is increasing fast. In Java, the felling of almost all of the island’s forests and their replacement by plantation agriculture has sent immeasurable quantities of soil, pesticides and fertilizers into surrounding seas, threatening local reefs with algal blooms.

In other areas, the massive release of sediments is the most damaging consequence of deforestation. Brazil, for example, where felling in the Parana region has silted the Sao Francisco river so greatly that water treatment costs for over 200 cities have increased. The costs of clearing up the mess that “development” has caused is beginning to outrun the ability of any government to pay.

Lake Chad, once a huge expanse of water – and the center of an enormous basin – is now a shadow of its former self. Dams have reduced inflow to the lake, converting open water into marshy wetlands – home to far fewer fish species and dominated by hardy catfish. Dams are slowly emptying Lake Victoria too, as Uganda seeks to maintain its electricity supply and agricultural production. Daniel Krull, a U.N. hydrologist, has estimated that water levels in the lake are at the lowest for eighty years – a result of both drought and development.

GIWA is veiled, but astute, in its condemnation of the development model pushed by the rich nations via the World Bank and IMF: “On all continents, the inhabitants of desert and semi-arid zones have strayed from their traditional path of sustainable water use and now overexploit their scarce surface and upper groundwater supplies. Inappropriate landuse management, inefficient use of freshwater by irrigation, evaporation from reservoirs, and greater water demand fuelled by the expansion of agriculture, as well as overpopulation and economic growth, have resulted in greater water scarcity and an increase in the frequency and duration of droughts.” The belief that capitalism could turn deserts into market gardens, and that huge monocultures could feed the millions, has brought us to an environmental precipice. However, this is not just confined to the exploitation of freshwater. It is a tragedy that envelopes the globe.

Fishin’ Gone

Garrett Hardin, the biologist and political philosopher, gave us the concept of the tragedy of the commons, a theoretical situation in which individuals remorselessly exploit a given resource until their collective decisions cause the productivity of that resource to collapse. Acting in their own interest, he suggested, the benefit of one individual action would always outweigh the detriment caused to the group as a whole. Hence, without a form of communal or governmental regulation, the commons is doomed.

Unfortunately, GIWA suggests that global fisheries behave in a very similar way. Almost sixty percent of the fishing regions investigated could be described as “severely overexploited,” largely as a result of “excessive fishing effort of industrial fishing fleets.” These fleets are often maintained by government subsidies in order to earn the foreign exchange needed to pay off national debts, whilst the need for that cash makes it all but impossible for an individual nation to enforce regulations that would ensure a sustainable fishery. Due to cutbacks in government budgets, individual fishermen are also locked into the same tragedy of the commons.

GIWA puts this into a global context. Along the coasts of the world, but particularly in the undeveloped world, “the lack of access to credit, alternative employment and social support leaves poverty stricken fishers little option but to unsustainably exploit dwindling stocks and employ destructive fishing practices to increase catches.” Even if they desired it, fishermen could not voluntarily cut back production, just as farmers cannot adopt “traditional” methods that use less water, and native crops that are less water intensive. The requirements of international trade, and the weakness of the state have set up a cycle of exploitation from which they cannot escape.

A recent Mother Jones special edition caught this well. Julia Whitty describes how worldwide commercial fish catches that grew some 500 percent between 1950 and 1997 are now in decline after peaking at a level of 96 million tons. The scramble for fish stocks has stimulated the adoption of new technolgies such as long-line fishing that in turn have intensified the exploitation of those same stocks and driven fishermen into renewed competition. Poorer fishermen seeing diminishing returns have resorted to ever more environmentally destructive methods – such as cyanide poisoning and dynamiting – to increase or even maintain their yields.

In America, Michael Robbins argues, the tragedy of the commons has been achieved through a symbiotic combination of the fishing industry and those set up to regulate them. Regional regulatory councils that set allowable catches are staffed mainly by industry insiders – fishermen, recreational boat owners and seafood processors. “Consequently,” he says, “the councils are dominated by the same industry that is exploiting the natural resource the councils are charged with conserving.”

Aquaculture has boomed as a corporate niche in this steadily depleting system yet that too is an environmental disaster. For every pound of farmed Salmon produced, three pounds of wild fish are generally needed as feed stock. Fish farming introduces non-native species for the sake of profit, and spreads disease while it “often requires the clearance of coastal habitats, such as mangroves, and can cause eutrophication and other pollution.” These mangroves, as the tsunami of 2004 showed, are the best natural defence against storm surges and flooding. They provide spawning grounds for fish – and hence an economic resource for local populations, as well as a source of wood for fuel and construction if managed responsibly. Unfortunately, mangroves do not allow for the creation of industrial fish farms, nor the conversion of thousands of miles of coast into tourist resorts.

Water we to do?

Across the world, the abuse of water via agriculture, industry, development projects, fishing and uncontrolled urbanization, is marginalizing the poor. The rich, always able to escape the brute realities of ecological exploitation, and pin the blame upon the poor. This cannot go on. As the head of the United Nations Environment Plan (UNEP), Klaus Toepfer, said of the report, “our collective failure to value the goods and services provided by international waters, and to narrowly price the benefits in terms of the few rather than the many, is impoverishing us all.”

GIWA suggests that industrial agriculture is incompatible with an equitable water policy in the future. None of the official pronouncements accompanying the World Water Forum made this clear. Not just that, but corporate fishing, aquaculture and tourism are not compatible with either maritime biodiversity or a decent protein supply for the developing world. The problem is that the goods produced by these practices are kept low by subsidies and economies of scale, whilst they exclude the actual costs of their production. These environmental and social costs are then passed onto people in the developing world, either as tax or in the form of new debts. Until “externalities” like the destruction of mangroves, or coral reefs, are factored into fishing or tourism, the “tragedy of the commons” will continue to apply.

This seems to be exactly what another key player in the World Water Forum is seeking to achieve. The African Development Bank delivered their own report (minus any scientific research), which proposed huge new investments in large scale infrastructure. “Most countries,” they said, “have not invested sufficiently in water infrastructure and institutions. Major infrastructure must be built to mitigate flood and drought, and to provide access to water resources for health, productive uses and pollution control, before Africa can achieve water security.” Of course, any course of action for the “industry” would need hefty corporate assistance as, “growth is more likely when a vibrant private sector is deeply involved in the development of the sector.” The Bank suggested a modest investment of $20 billion per year (they do not mention the likely consequences of climate change) in order to increase the acreage under irrigation – and the quantity of cash crops flowing to western markets.

This approach is business-as-usual, the same approach that enriches western construction companies, seeks to extend a totally unsustainable agricultural model and is turning the seas into deserts. GIWA is more realistic, and despite the fact that it suggests no radical solutions, it is honest in its appraisal of both the environment and the people who abuse it. Yet even then its methodology does not explicitly factor in the effects of climate change – although it is mentioned when relevant. If the likely effects on water supplies of diminished or irregular rainfall, melting glaciers, sea rises, flash floods and rising temperatures are considered – then the outlook is truly bleak.

Perhaps it was this honesty that made the report unpalatable for the mainstream media – who prefer to bury their heads in the sand. Well, soon enough, there will be plenty of sand for them to explore unless we find a way of defusing the tragedies which are remorselessly stripping the global commons.

Posted by Szamko
Just tries to tell the truth.

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