Management of the world's water resources must not be reduced to politically motivated decisions. Patrick Smyth reports from Kyoto.
It takes 2,000 litres of water to produce and distill a single glass of brandy. Yet many millions in Sub-Saharan Africa will eke out an existence on less than 20 litres a day, half the UN-recommended minimum needed to keep body and soul together.
So what's the connection? There is water here in Europe, not there, you will say. That's the problem.
And yet it's not quite that simple. In India it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce a ton of wheat worth perhaps $200. That same quantity of water could also be used to expand industrial output by some $10,000.
So who should get the water? The farmer or the industrialist? The Indian dilemma, one that reflects a similar global problem, is not only about dealing with natural shortages, but about hard choices and management of resources, ultimately politics. In UN-speak "governance".
In the western United States, cities are buying rights of access to fast-depleting water tables from farmers. In the Middle East the iron logic of the market and growth of cities has seen a massive diversion of water from irrigation. Once grain-sufficient countries, such as Jordan, Egypt, and Iran, are becoming massive importers of grain. Some nine of the 14 nations in the Middle East are already facing water stress - six of them will see their populations double in the next 25 years.
Currently irrigation consumes some 70 per cent of man's water use - mostly very inefficiently. Industry uses 20 per cent, and 10 per cent goes to domestic use. Can that balance, propped up by massive subsidies to farmers, possibly be sustained as 80 million more people every year add to demand? And tensions between sectors over scarce resources mirror those between regions and states. Some 263 or two-thirds of the world's major rivers, flow through several states and conflict over the water flow is a major source of friction.
Roughly two-thirds of Israel's water comes from the disputed Golan Heights and the West Bank, while Egypt has threatened war with Ethiopia if it goes ahead with plans to divert part of the Nile flow.
Syria and Turkey each have military build-ups in defence of their water rights on the Euphrates and Tigris. The Salween river is a major source of contention between China, Myanmar and Thailand, each of which has dam plans. While India and Pakistan have been at loggerheads for years over the Indus and the Ganges, inside Pakistan the state of Sind has seen massive unrest at "water theft" by its up-river neighbour, the Punjab, said to be starving Sind farmers of their means of irrigation.
The answer, in theory, lies in the idea of moving to joint management of river basins, like the ten-state Nile Basin Initiative, but when countries are barely speaking to each other the danger is that population pressures may push them to all-out confrontation for this most precious of resources.
And there are of course "natural" shortages. But many of those are also linked to human policy decisions or neglect, from the pollution of water supplies to over-pumping, to catastrophic waste through leaking water systems - many city systems leak up to 60 per cent of the water they pump.
Irrigation systems are even worse. The world's aquifers are being depleted annually by some 160 billion tons of water more than they are being naturally refilled - that's enough water to produce half the US annual grain harvest. Over-pumping in Indonesia has led to seepage by the sea as much as 15 kilometres inland.
Industrial production in North America - and the ubiquitous American SUV motor industry - are pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, exacerbating climate swings in South America with disastrous effects. Precipitation levels are down by up to 25 per cent in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa over a 20-year period. The flows of rivers like the Niger have fallen over a third. And the other side of the climate change coin is the upsurge in disastrous flooding - in the 1990s there were some 26 major floods compared to only six in the 1950s.
Such issues are central to the debates that have raged here at the third World Water Forum, a triennial gathering of hydrologists, government representatives, NGOs, and multilateral institutions like the World Bank.
Some 10,000 delegates and journalists swarm through the countless meetings to hear debates on the relationship of water to poverty, climate, transport, culture, gender, islands, cities . . . and much of the language is a dreary UN/development-speak that conceals the pain underlying the issues being debated.
Occasionally there are outbursts of plainspeak from community activists from first and third worlds whose attendance has been sponsored by some NGO. There was the woman from the Michigan Welfare Alliance who complained about thousands of municipal disconnections in Detroit. And the splendid former Malian minister, Aminata Traoure, who attacked privatisation of water: "Everything in Africa is sold," she said, pointing at the water company man from Suez. "You are a coalition against the people."
Privatisation is certainly the bug-bear here of many of the NGOs, with the EU under particular fire for promoting the idea in the preparations for the next round of world trade talks. "We're not saying that the public sector is perfect. But at least they're accountable to the people," said Liane Greeff of the South African Civil Society Water Caucus.
Spokesmen for the World Bank point out, however, insisting they have no ideological hang-ups on the issue, that only some five per cent of water is currently supplied by the private sector. All accept that solving the problems of dispersed rural communities will ultimately be left to public sector efforts. The related issue of water pricing is also controversial, with many economists insisting that unless realistic, cost-related charges are imposed, whether in cities or in the countryside, huge inefficiencies will continue to distort water use. Huge advances in water productivity on the land are possible with modern techniques, they argue.
Much of the forum, at which no decisions will be taken, is devoted to examples of good practice but there is a sense that already time has been lost. Investment in water projects has been falling since 1997. Targets agreed to reduce by half those without access to safe water by 2015 will not be met.
And it is easy to despair - Ayako Sono, of the Nippon Foundation, movingly described the aid worker's dilemma faced by the HIV-positive breast-feeding mother. She realised that to persuade the mother to switch to powdered milk to reduce the risk of infection was likely to sentence the baby to death by diarrhoea from contaminated water.
But there were also stirring calls to action and conscience. "Water is currently at the service of the world's middle classes who regard the poor as dispensible," said Jan Pronk, a former Dutch minister who now heads a major water Inter-Governmental Organisation. He warns that the world is dividing between two paradigms, the essentially selfish preoccupation with security, and sustainability which is about creating "a safer secure place for each and every individual". It is "the only guarantee of world security," he says.
Alvaro Umana, the Costa Rican head of the UN Development Programme's sustainability unit, insists "we have the knowledge, technology and resources to provide access to safe drinking water for all on the planet". The problem, he argues, is only political will."But we have the responsibility to do it."
Patrick Smyth was at the summit courtesy of the World Bank as a prizewinner in an international journalism competition for writing about water. www.thirdworldwaterforum.org
Water and want
• 1.4 billion people have no access to safe water.
• 2.3 billion, a third of the world's population, have no access to safe sanitation.
• 2 million tons of human waste are dumped into rivers and lakes around the world every day.
• 90 per cent of developing countries' sewage flows untreated into rivers, lakes and the sea.
• Those ill from waterborn diseases occupy half the world's hospital beds - seven million of them die each year.
• Since 1990 more children have died from diarrhoea than all deaths in armed conflicts since 1945.
• Daily domestic urban water use per head:
US - 600 litres
Europe - 250-300 litres
Sub-Saharan Africa - 10-20 litres
• In the last 100 years, the world's population has tripled and water consumption is up sixfold.
• The UN predicts nearly half the world's population will experience water shortages in 2025.
• In 1900 there were no dams larger than 15 metres; in 1950 there were 5,000, and today there are 45,000. Dam construction has displaced between 40 million and 80 million people.
• The average global sea level has risen 0.48 metres since 1990, between two and four times the rate of increase during the 20th century.
And yet . . .
• The bottled water market grew last year by 20per cent to 100 billion bottles.