The deficit of fresh water is becoming increasingly severe and widespread. Unlike other resources, there is no substitute for water. Accessible supplies of fresh water are limited, and people’s needs keeps rising.

It is simply no longer possible to continue to consume fresh water at 20th century levels. In poorer countries, millions of people die each year from using untreated water because they have no alternative. According to a worldwide study conducted by the World Health Organisation (WHO), 80 percent of infectious diseases and epidemics are caused by bad water.

Before formulating a policy to address the global water crisis, we must first of all recognise its true causes.

First and foremost is the growth of the world’s population and of agricultural, industrial, and energy production, which are the main consumers of water. Then there are the environmental consequences of economic activities and the destruction of natural ecosystems, the wasteful use of water and other natural resources in an economy driven by the lure of hyperprofits and excessive consumption, and mass poverty and backwardness in countries where authorities are not able ­and often have no desire­ to organise effective water management. And finally there is the arms race and the senseless waste of enormous amounts of wealth and resources in wars and conflicts.

It is thus clear that the water problem cannot be successfully addressed in isolation from other global challenges and the overall international context.

Green Cross International (GCI) has been working for twenty years at the nexus of problems of security, poverty, and the environment. Some time ago, GCI launched the Water for Life and Peace initiative. We proposed developing an international convention on the right to water, and in July 2010 a resolution by the United Nations General Assembly explicitly recognised the human right to water and sanitation and acknowledged that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realisation of all human rights.

What is needed now is the practical implementation of this principle. Until now, only a few countries have included the right to water in their national legislation.

GCI is taking an active role in the development of measures aimed at preserving and rationally managing water resources. GCI is working to speed the entry into force of the United Nations Convention on non-navigational uses of international waterways; at the same time we are implementing specific projects to guarantee the right to water.

I am convinced that the water crisis is closely related to the flaws of contemporary economics and politics.

We are living at a time when the world is still reeling from the consequences of a severe global economic crisis. The emerging signs of recovery in the world economy should not deceive us.

The crisis has shown that the currently dominant model of economic growth is unsustainable. Indeed, this model engenders crises, social injustice, and the danger of environmental catastrophe. There is a clear need for an evolutionary but sufficiently rapid transition to a different model that will have to include a combination of markets and private initiatives with the principles of social and environmental responsibility of business and effective government regulation.

We therefore need to rethink the goals of economic development. Consumption must not remain the only or the principal driver of growth. The economy needs to be reoriented to goals that include public goods such as a sustainable environment, people’s health in the broadest sense of the word, education, culture, and social cohesion, including closing the glaring gaps between the rich and the poor.

Major water projects, both national and international, could become one of the engines in a qualitatively new stage of the development of the global economy.

The world needs a new political architecture, a new architecture of security, global governance and sustainable development. It should be based on the rejection of confrontational thinking or any attempts to dominate international relations and on the demilitarisation of international politics. Only on such a basis will we be able to respond to the main challenges of this century: the challenge of security, the challenge of poverty and backwardness, and the challenge of the global environmental crisis. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

*Mikhail Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1985-1991 and is the founding president of Green Cross International (GCI).

By Mikhail Gorbachev
MOSCOW, Oct 28 2009 (IPS)

Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the shameful symbols of the Cold War and the dangerous division of the world into opposing blocks and spheres of influence. Today we can revisit the events of those times and take stock of them in a less emotional and more rational way.

The first optimistic observation to be made is that the announced ‘End of History’ has not come about, though many claimed it had. But neither has the world that many politicians of my generation trusted and sincerely believed in: one in which, with the end of the Cold War, humankind could finally forget the absurdity of the arms race, dangerous regional conflicts, and sterile ideological disputes and enter a golden century of collective security, the rational use of material resources, the end of poverty and inequality, and restored harmony with nature.

Another very important consequence of the end of the Cold War is the realisation of one of the central postulates of New Thinking: the interdependence of extremely important elements that go to the very heart of the existence and development of humankind. This involves not only processes and events occurring on different continents but also the organic linkage between changes in the economic, technological, social, demographic, and cultural conditions that determine the daily existence of billions of people on our planet. In effect, humankind has started to transform itself into a single civilisation.

At the same time, the disappearance of the Iron Curtain and barriers and borders, unexpected by many, made possible connections between countries that had until recently had different political systems, as well as different civilisations, cultures, and traditions.

Naturally, we politicians from the last century can be proud of the fact that we avoided the danger of a thermonuclear war. However, for many millions of people around the globe, the world has not become a safer place. Quite to the contrary, innumerable local conflicts and ethnic and religious wars have appeared like a curse on the new map of world politics, creating large numbers of victims.

Clear proof of the irrational behaviour and irresponsibility of the new generation of politicians is the fact that defence spending by numerous large and small countries alike is now greater than during the Cold War, and strong-arm tactics are once again the standard way of dealing with conflicts and a common feature of international relations.

Alas, over the last few decades the world has not become a fairer place: disparities between the rich and poor either remained or increased not only between the North and the developing South but also within developed countries themselves. The social problems in Russia, as in other post-communist countries, are proof that simply abandoning the flawed model of a centralised economy and bureaucratic planning is not enough and guarantees neither a country’s global competitiveness nor respect for the principles of social justice or a dignified standard of living for the population.

New challenges can be added to those of the past. One of these is terrorism. In a context in which world war is no longer an instrument of deterrence between the most powerful nations, terrorism has become the ‘poor man’s atomic bomb’, not only figuratively but perhaps literally as well. The uncontrolled proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the competition between the erstwhile adversaries of the Cold War to reach new technological levels in arms production, and the presence of the new pretenders to an influential role in a multipolar world all increase the sensation of chaos in global politics.

The crisis of ideologies that is threatening to turn into a crisis of ideals, values, and morals marks yet another loss of social reference points and strengthens the atmosphere of political pessimism and nihilism. The real achievement we can celebrate is the fact that the 20th century marked the end of totalitarian ideologies, in particular those that were based on Utopian beliefs.

Yet new ideologies are quickly replacing the old ones, both in the East and the West. Many now forget that the fall of the Berlin Wall was not the cause of global changes but to a great extent the consequence of deep, popular reform movements that started in the East and the Soviet Union in particular. After decades of the Bolshevik experiment and the realisation that this had led Soviet society down a historical blind alley, a strong impulse for democratic reform evolved in the form of Soviet Perestroika, which was also available to the countries of Eastern Europe.

But it was soon very clear that Western capitalism, too, deprived of its old adversary and imagining itself the undisputed victor and incarnation of global progress, is at risk of leading Western society and the rest of the world down another historical blind alley.

Today’s global economic crisis was needed to reveal the organic defects of the present model of Western development that was imposed on the rest of the world as the only one possible; it also revealed that not only bureaucratic socialism but also ultra-liberal capitalism are in need of profound democratic reform -their own kind of Perestroika.

Today, while we sit among the ruins of the old order, we can think of ourselves as active participants in the process of creating a new world. Many truths and postulates once considered indisputable, in both the East and the West, have ceased to be so, including the blind faith in the all-powerful market and, above all, its democratic nature. There was an ingrained belief that the western model of democracy could be spread mechanically to other societies with different historical experience and cultural traditions. In the present situation, even a concept like social progress, which seems to be shared by everyone, needs to be defined, and examined, more precisely. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet Union (1985-1991), Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (1990) and president of the World Political Forum (WPF).

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By Mikhail Gorbachev
MOSCOW, Jun 3 2009 (IPS)

One of the most urgent problems of today’s world is the danger of nuclear weapons. The unexpected nuclear test by North Korea on May 25 and the test-firing of a series of short-range missiles is the latest, frightening reminder.

Nothing fundamentally new has been achieved in the area of nuclear disarmament in the past decade and a half. Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the arsenals of the nuclear powers still contain thousands of weapons, and the world is facing the very real possibility of a new arms race.

In effect, all that has been achieved in nuclear disarmament until now is the implementation of the agreements that were signed in the late 1980s and early 1990s: the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987 (INF), which eliminated two classes of nuclear missiles, and the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which launched the biggest cutbacks of nuclear weapons ever. Thousands of tactical nuclear weapons were destroyed in accordance with this US-Soviet agreement.

Subsequently, the pace of nuclear arms reduction has slowed and the mechanisms of control and verifications have weakened. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) has not entered into force. The quantities of nuclear weapons held by Russia and the United States still far exceed the arsenals of all other nuclear powers combined, thus making it more difficult to bring them into the process of nuclear disarmament.

The nuclear non-proliferation regime is in jeopardy. While the two major nuclear powers bear the greatest responsibility for this state of affairs, it was the US that abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty), has failed to ratify the CTBT, and refused to conclude with Russia a legally binding, verifiable treaty on strategic offensive arms.

Only recently have we seen indications that the major nuclear powers understand the current state of affairs is untenable. The presidents of the US and Russia have agreed to conclude before the end of this year a verifiable treaty reducing strategic offensive arms and have reaffirmed their countries’ commitment to fulfil their obligations under the non-proliferation treaty. Their joint statement calls for a number of other steps to reduce nuclear dangers, including ratification by the US of the CTBT.

Those are positive steps. But the problems and dangers far outnumber the achievements. The root cause of this is the erroneous evaluation of the events that lead to the end of the Cold War. The US and some other countries saw these as a victory of the West and a green light for unilateralist policies. Accordingly, instead of creating a new architecture of international security based on real cooperation, an attempt was made to impose on the world a “monopoly leadership” by the sole remaining superpower and the institutions and organisations, like NATO, that were inherited from the Cold War and not reformed after it ended.

The use and the threat of force, which, of course, are illegal under the UN Charter, were reasserted as a “normal” mode of solving problems. Official documents rationalised doctrines of pre-emptive strike and the need for US military superiority.

Humanity must be wary of a new arms race. Priority is still being given to financing of military programmes, and “defence” budgets far exceeding reasonable security requirements keep growing, as does the weapons trade. US military expenditures are almost as high as those of the rest of the world combined. Disregard for international law and for peaceful ways of settling disputes, for the United Nations and its Security Council, is being proclaimed as a kind of policy.

As a result, we have witnessed a war in Europe -in Yugoslavia- something that had previously seemed inconceivable; a long-term deterioration in the Middle East; the war in Iraq; an extremely severe situation in Afghanistan and the increasingly alarming nuclear non-proliferation crisis.

Its main cause is the failure of the members of the nuclear club to fulfil their obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to move towards the elimination of nuclear weapons. As long as this is the case, there will be a continued danger that other countries may acquire nuclear weapons. Today, dozens of states have the technical ability to do so.

In the final analysis, the nuclear danger can only be removed by abolishing nuclear weapons. But unless we address the need to demilitarise international relations, reduce military budgets, put an end to the creation of new kinds of weapons, and prevent the weaponisation of outer space, all talk about a nuclear-weapon-free world will be just empty rhetoric.

I think that after President Obama’s speech on April 5, there is a real prospect that the US will ratify the CTBT. This would be an important step forward, particularly in combination with a new strategic arms reduction treaty between the US and Russia.

Following this, I believe that other nuclear powers, both the “official members” of the club and others, will have to, at the very least, declare a freeze on their nuclear arsenals and state their readiness to engage in negotiations on their limitation and reduction. If the holders of the largest stocks of nuclear weapons embark upon real reductions, others will no longer be able to sit it out and conceal their arsenals from international control.

This is an issue that we must raise now if we are to have the kind of trust without which common security cannot be achieved. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mikhail Gorbachev was leader of the Soviet Union from 1985-1991.

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