International Herald Tribune
By Kevin Watkins
One hundred years ago, William Mulholland introduced the citizens of
California to a new concept in state politics: the water grab.
Charged with securing water supplies for a small, thirsty town in a
desert, the baron of the Los Angeles Department of Water hit on an
imaginative response. He quietly bought up water rights in the Owens
Valley, 230 miles to the north, built an aquifer across the blistering
Mojave Desert, and took the water to downtown Los Angeles. When local
ranchers protested by dynamiting his aquifer, Mulholland declared war,
responding with a massive show of armed force.
Nowadays southern Californians fight over water in courts of law.
Angelenos have some of America's greenest lawns and biggest swimming
pools, not to mention a desert that blooms with cotton and fruit.
Keeping it that way means piping in water from hundreds of miles away
and draining a Colorado River so depleted that it barely reaches the
sea. And it means disputing every drop of the Colorado with Arizona.
The Mulholland model represents a brutish form of what has been a
global approach to water management. Want to urbanize and industrialize
at breakneck speed? Then dam and divert your rivers to meet the demand.
Want to expand the agricultural frontier? Then mine your aquifers and
groundwaters.
This week and next, governments, international agencies and
nongovernmental organizations are gathering in Mexico City at the World
Water Forum to discuss the legacy of global Mulhollandism in water -
and to chart a new course.
They could hardly have chosen a better location. Water is being pumped
out of the aquifer on which Mexico City stands at twice the rate of
replenishment. The result: the city is subsiding at the rate of about
half a meter every decade. You can see the consequences in the cracked
cathedrals, the tilting Palace of Arts and the broken water and
sewerage pipes.
Every region of the world has its own variant of the water crisis
story. The mining of groundwaters for irrigation has lowered the water
table in parts of India and Pakistan by 30 meters in the past three
decades. As water goes down, the cost of pumping goes up, undermining
the livelihoods of poor farmers. Meanwhile, a lethal combination of
water shortages, soil salination, and waterlogging threatens the
breadbaskets of both countries. In India, about one quarter of grain
production is based on unsustainable groundwater use.
In China, urbanization and rapid growth has lifted millions of people
out of poverty. It has also left a water crisis of epic proportions.
The Hai-Huai-Yellow river basin tells its own story. More than 80
percent of river lengths are chronically polluted. The basin is home to
more than 400 million people and about one half of the rural poor. It
produces more than half of China's wheat and corn. And it is running
out of water. Current use exceeds river flow by a third, leading to
another case of groundwater overexploitation.
What is driving the global water crisis? Physical availability is part
of the problem. Unlike oil or coal, water is an infinitely renewable
resource, but it is available in a finite quantity. With water use
increasing at twice the rate of population growth, the amount available
per person is shrinking - especially in some of the poorest countries.
Over the next 25 years, the number of people living in countries with
water crises will increase from 700 million to 2.2 billion, with more
than half of the populations of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa
affected. Factor in global warming, which could reduce rainfall in
parts of sub-Saharan Africa by up to a quarter over the next century,
and this is starting to look like a crisis in the making for human
development.
Growing scarcity means more competition. And as William Mulholland
taught us all those years ago, competition without good governance can
turn ugly - especially for those without power. Conflicts between
agricultural users on the one side and urban and industrial users on
the other are intensifying. The danger is that the poorest farmers with
the weakest voice in water management will lose out, with devastating
consequences for global poverty reduction efforts.
Challenging as physical scarcity may be in some countries, the real
problems in water go deeper. The 20th-century model for water
management was based on a simple idea: that water is an infinitely
available free resource to be exploited, dammed or diverted without
reference to scarcity or sustainability.
Forty years ago, the Aral Sea covered an area the size of Belgium.
Thanks to Soviet-era planners who diverted the Amu Dary and the Syr
Darya rivers into cotton irrigation, it has been reduced to a couple of
small, lifeless hypersaline lakes. In the United States, farmers on the
High Plains are pumping water from the Ogallala aquifer - one of the
world's oldest fossil aquifers - at eight times the recharge rate. From
Texas to the Punjab, groundwater mining is not only tolerated but
supported by hefty subsidies directed to large farmers.
Across the world, water-based ecological systems - rivers, lakes and
watersheds - have been taken beyond the frontiers of ecological
sustainability by policy makers who have turned a blind eye to the
consequences of over- exploitation.
We need a new model of water management for the 21st century. What does
that mean? For starters, we have to stop using water like there's no
tomorrow - and that means using it more efficiently at levels that do
not destroy our environment. The buzz- phrase at the Mexico Water forum
is "integrated water resource management." What it means is that
governments need to manage the private demand of different users and
manage this precious resource in the public interest.
There is another, equally profound challenge. In an era of intensifying
competition, we have to ensure that the world's poor do not suffer an
early 21st century variant of the fate of the residents of Owens
Valley. That means strengthening the rights and the voice of the poor -
and it means putting social justice at the center of water management.
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