DEVELOPMENT: Study Pleads for Considering Security Implications of Water

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

By Walter Kissinger BONN, Nov 8 2001 (IPS) - More than one billion people lack access to safe water supplies.

Almost three billion are deprived of adequate sanitation. Five to ten million people die each year from water-related diseases or inadequate public health and hygiene, especially the water supply and sewage systems.

Twenty percent of the world’s irrigated lands are salt-laden, affecting crop production.

A new study attributes all this to the absence of an adequate international legal framework for water resources management.

Authored by Aaron T. Wolf from the Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University, the report pleads for considering the security implications of what is “a critical, non-substitutable” asset.

The study will serve as a thematic background paper for government ministers, experts and non-governmental organisations participating in the International Conference on Fresh Water to be held in Bonn from December 3 to 7.

The secretariat for the conference that the German government will host in close cooperation with the United Nations, has been provided by the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ).

Entitled “Transboundary Waters: Sharing Benefits, Lessons Learned”, the report argues that the scarcity of water in arid and semi-arid environments leads to intense political pressures, often referred to as “water stress”.

However, according to Wolf, the most recent legal document on international waters, the 1997 Convention on the Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses, is vague and occasionally contradictory.

..The Convention is in fact rendered ineffective by the fact that four years after its adoption by the U.N. General Assembly, it has been signed only by 16 countries and ratified by 9, well below the 35 needed to bring the treaty into force.

The report regrets that the international agencies historically have been limited in developing a strategy to deal with international water resource disputes. As a result, while water quantity has been the major issue of the last century, water quality has been “neglected to the point of catastrophe”.

The fact that water is a critical, non-substitutable resource, which flows and fluctuates across time and space, and which is becoming relatively more scarce and degraded as world populations and standards of living grow, should provide compelling arguments for considering the security implications of water resources management, says the study.

“Add the fact that water has been a cause of political tensions between Arabs and Israelis; Indians and Bangladeshis; Americans and Mexicans; and all ten riparian states of the Nile River, and it is of little surprise that ‘water’ and ‘war’ are two topics being assessed together with increasing frequency,” argues the paper made available by the GTZ-managed conference secretariat in Bonn.

The saving grace, however, is that the record of acute conflict over international water resources is overwhelmed by the record of cooperation. The last 50 years have seen only 37 acute disputes that involved violence, while, during the same period, 157 treaties were negotiated and signed.

According to the study, the total number of water-related events is equally weighted towards cooperation: 507 conflict- related events, and 1,228 cooperative ones.

“Violence over water seems neither strategically rational nor economically viable,” notes Wolf, the author of the study, with an obvious satisfaction.

Nevertheless, he adds, it is important to understand that there is a history of water-related violence – a history of incidents at the sub-national level, generally between tribes, water-use sectors, or states/provinces.

In fact, there are many examples of internal water conflicts ranging from inter-state violence and death along the Cauvery River in India, to California farmers blowing up a pipeline meant for Los Angeles, to much of the violent history in the Americas between indigenous peoples and European settlers.

“The desert state of Arizona in the United States even commissioned a navy (made up of one ferryboat) and sent its state militia to stop a dam and diversion on the Colorado River in 1934. What we seem to be finding is that geographic scale and intensity of conflict are inversely related,” says the report.

While these disputes can and do occur at the sub-national level, the human security issue is more subtle and more pervasive. As water quality degrades – or quantity diminishes – over time, the effect on the stability of a region can be unsettling, warns the study.

An examination of relations between India and Bangladesh demonstrate that these internal instabilities can be both caused and exacerbated by international water disputes.

In the 1960s, India built a barrage at Farakka, diverting a portion of the Ganges flow away from its course into Bangladesh, in an effort to flush silt away from Calcutta’s seaport, some 160 kilometers to the south.

In Bangladesh, reduced upstream flow, while only occurring during a six-week period, resulted in a number of adverse effects: degraded surface and groundwater, impeded navigation, increased salinity, degraded fisheries, and endangered water supplies and public health.

Migration from affected areas for these and economic reasons, further compounded the problem. Ironically, many of those displaced in Bangladesh found refuge in India. India and Bangladesh signed a treaty amicably resolving these issues in 1996.

The report emphasizes that there is also the human security issue of water-related disease.

It is estimated that between 5 and 10 million people die each year from water-related diseases or inadequate sanitation. More than half the people in the world lack adequate sanitation. Eighty percent of disease in the developing world is related to water.

“This is a crisis of epidemic proportions, and the threats to human security are self-evident, and not restricted to transboundary waters,” warns the report.