Anybody Got A Glass Of Water?

According to a collection of Deep Thinkers, High Minded sorts and sundry politicos currently assembled in Istanbul we have another crises looming in the very near future. As if global climate change (that's the new approved phrase apparently with global warming having been consigned to the graveyard of yesterday's rhetoric) were not enough, the world's population now has to worry about where its next glass of water is coming from.

The Geek is sensitive about water since he lives in an area which is (at best) semi-arid. Not surprisingly he resonates with the problems surrounding acquiring sufficient clean water to meet basic requirements.

While the globe is mainly water, most of it is either (a)salty or (b) too concentrated in too few places. There are beaucoup losers in the water sweepstakes as a result of the inherent maldistribution of aquatic wealth.

Compounding the problem is the expense involved with capturing, purifying and distributing water to an increasingly urbanised world population. From the earliest days of urbanization down to the present time the provision of adequate water to a city's population has been a major financial challenge.

Of course one person's financial challenge is another person's financial opportunity. This brings into sharp focus the basic dilemma facing the crowd assembled in Istanbul for the Fifth World Water Forum.

The question at hand whether phrased this explicitly or not is this: Is access to water a basic human right akin to access to oxygen or is water a commodity access to which is predicated upon the user's capacity to pay?

In the US as in Europe and portions of Asia, Latin America, the Mideast and Africa, people are accustomed to the idea that the provision of water is a normal part of local government services. Water is or has been seen as readily available and modestly priced. Hardly anyone gives thought to the vast, complex and expensive infrastructure required to make sure that when the faucet is opened drinkable water flows out.

Only after a prolonged drought, the kind that ultimately results in restrictions on lawn watering or washing cars, does the average American think at all about water. Then it is usually with resentment toward those who seek to limit the right to green grass or shiny cars or sparkling pools in the backyard.

We forget (if we ever even knew) that water is required not only for mixing drinks, making coffee, or washing. It is the essential without which plants won't grow, cattle won't fatten and chickens won't lay. The wheels of industry (to use an old cliche) are lubricated with water not oil.

It is the agricultural and industrial usages of water which push the per capita consumption of the wet stuff to multiple hundreds of gallons throughout the developed countries. The centrality of water to economic well being even more than the cleanliness fetishes of the US and other countries constitutes the reason that our usage of water is so much greater than that of people in the lesser developed nations.

The commercial employment of water resources serves to further sharpen the basic question regarding the status of water: Is it a right or a commodity?

For the past two or three centuries the model of water as basic, cheap government service has performed very well in Europe and the US. Overall the US experience of the past 125 years has been exceptionally positive. Public health and economic well being alike have been enhanced enormously.

Our water supply in common with that of most of Europe reached such a level that we have been both worry free and wealthy enough to buy bottled water in oceanic quantities.

As we Americans surfed our way along the never ending wave of fresh, safe, (usually) good tasting water we have been willing to overlook some unpleasant realities. Water shortages are not limited to remote sections of the Sahel or desert metropoli such as Los Angles or Phoenix.

The great aquifers which run as slow moving vast rivers under the American Midwest are running dry. From the northern great plains to Texas the wells must go ever deeper and are ever more expensive. While not yet upon us, the potential of severe agricultural shortfalls and price increases is no longer lost in some far distant future.

The US is not alone in this situation. Consider China. The Chinese government undertook a large program of expanding cultivation in semi-arid lands in the north and west of the country. The idea was to tap underground water. This was done. As was predictable the demands to meet production quotas resulted in over pumping of the aquifers. These have been running dry for the past several years.

As a result China has had to go on the international market for basic commodities such as rice, wheat and corn. The "law" of supply and demand was invoked with the result that the prices paid by Americans for these commodities increased slightly but measurably.

The water-agriculture linkage is even more clearly seen in the Mideast. The assorted oil states cannot raise more than a small fraction of the food required to feed their population. The introduction of vastly expensive desalinization plants has in no way changed this fact.

The majority of Mideastern and Persian Gulf states have no choice but to import the majority, the overwhelming majority, of their food needs. Even Israel, which is a world leader in water conserving agricultural techniques, must either import food or water.

Turkey has put forward a scheme to export water to Israel. Turkey has an abundance of water, far more than its domestic requirements for all categories of use. From the perspective of Ankara it makes good sense to treat water as a commodity and sell it to any and all comers.

Dogan Altinbilek, the former head of the Turkey's General Directorate of State Hydraulic Works, is one of the developers of the sell-water-to-Israel plan. He sees it as a vital measure in the prevention of war. He has a point. A very good point. Israel's appetite for water has turned the Jordan River into a muddy ditch and dropped the level of the Dead Sea.

Buying water from Turkey is better than fighting for it with either or both Syria and Jordan. While the Turkish idea may have merit, would it not establish a potentially bad precedent?

The more water is treated as a commodity the more it will be a commodity. The slippery slope starts with the industrial and agricultural use of water. In these sectors the cost of the water can be factored into the final price of whatever is produced by its usage.

Historically water for agricultural and industrial use has been provided by either governmental owned and operated utilities or cooperatives. The costs have been low, often subsidised as is typically the case with American irrigation projects.

Introducing private sector vendors changes the nature as well as the scale of the game. It also greatly increases the risks to those dependent upon the private sector operator.

A fine example of the risk-enhancing nature of private operation of large scale water projects comes from the early experience in California's Imperial Valley. The irrigation which made agricultural prosperity possible in that region started as a private sector operation. The risks and costs grew too great. The private sector investors took their money elsewhere. The government, both state and federal, had to take over the system, improve it at general taxpayer expense and run it with tax payer subsidies for the benefit of the agricultural users.

Private corporations have no responsibilities other than providing a profit to stockholders. That's it. Period. There ain't no such critter as a "good corporate citizen." To assure a profit, corporations will cut services, raise prices, abandon projects.

Put together, these attributes of normal corporate behaviour assure that depending on the private sector for a constant supply of low cost water for either industrial or agricultural employment is a very risky affair--for the customers as well as anyone who relies on these customers for employment or products.

Experience in South America over the past decade shows that privatization of water utilities is a poor bet for residential or personal usage as well. Regardless of commitments, private owners of formerly governmental run water utilities have raised prices, cut quality, failed to improve infrastructure and generally behaved as if they had the people of the area by the short hairs. They did.

Once one leaves the rarefied realm of expensive bottled and specialty water or the narrow field of private, personal wells, the facts militate against the idea of water-as-commodity. This would seem to leave the field exclusively to the water-as-governmental-guaranteed-right alternative.

For the High Minded this seems self-evident. Other than oxygen, they argue, nothing is more essential to life itself than water. True. In principle.

But, there are a lot of places on the planet where there is no water. None falls from the sky. At least not dependably. Not predictably. Not enough in relation to the population. No water sits around in convenient rivers or lakes. Not even in ponds.

If there is water underground, it is deep. Expensive to tap. Expensive to pump. Even with the best of wills, a government cannot manufacture water.

Who is going to force a government to provide water? Who is going to provide the money and technical resources necessary to tap any (presumed) sub-surface water deposits?

Is some overarching body going to force a "water-rich" country such as Finland to provide low cost water to a "water-poor" country such as Mali? The UN? Some new entity--a Global Water Authority perhaps?

Right. Fer sure, dudes.

There are no easy, viable solutions for a very real problem. The problem is simple to state: There are too many people competing for too little water in much of the world.

The solution is not to be found in either the "market" or in some new global mechanism of coercion and control. The solution will require that one of two dynamics occur.

The first choice is that governments take their responsibilities for the well being of their citizens seriously, placing that above matters of personal ego, national ambition or ideological dictates.

The second option is a dramatic reduction in the number of people inhabiting the globe.

Either of these alternatives would require a miracle at least an order of magnitude greater than a mere Second Coming.