Harald D. Frederiksen
Mr. Frederiksen served with the India Irrigation Division and later was head of the Water Resources Advisory Unit for the country departments in the World Bank’s South and East Asia regions, following management positions in two international consulting firms.
Most countries, including many of the world’s largest, are rapidly increasing demands upon overcommitted national and international water resources, transforming disputes among riparians into serious regional and international security issues. The economic and social impacts, even the consequences of the displacement and migration of the affected people, are already evident. High population growth rates, unsustainable in most regions, amplify the problems. Now, pressing concerns for food self-sufficiency are causing the wealthier water-short countries to seek agreements to produce their food supply in distant countries that are also short of water. Yet the leading nations and agencies of the international community do not sufficiently highlight the security risks in situations where several riparians aggressively struggle over the same resources. There is no active permanent effort to deal with current crises and prepare for future ones.
Since the 1800s, people have spoken of pending crises for all of mankind caused by high population growth and limited natural resources. While the end has not been physically reached, the ramifications of today’s conditions in several regions are approaching crisis levels from the standpoint of international security. Millions of people confront the severe risks that will be triggered by the next inevitable drought in their regions. Even without global warming, crippling water shortages will multiply.
To illustrate, crises in four regions — all with a different history of water issues — will be summarized. Three of them involve neighboring countries within a larger unstable area, a coincidence that could further aggravate their individual conditions. The first, South Asia, describes a basin without a permanent water-sharing agreement. The second, the Nile River basin, is saddled with a disputed colonial allocation of resources awarded to one of the ten riparians. The third, the Middle East, has two basins in crisis, one with a dominating riparian, another where one riparian gained full control of the resources through prolonged military actions. The fourth illustrates the new phenomenon: wealthy countries short of water securing long-term arrangements for agricultural production to serve their own needs. Following the summary of the regional water disputes, a discussion is offered on the seeming ineffectiveness of the international community’s present organizational arrangements and agency charters and a suggestion for more productive deliberations to meet the urgent need for action now. These crises exist now, in 2009, not in some future year.
SOUTH ASIA
A 2009 World Bank report states that South Asia has both the highest percentage and the largest number of undernourished children in the world in spite of the recent burst in its economic growth. Malnutrition affects 43 to 46 percent of young children in India, Bangladesh and Nepal.1 Water supply is the region’s underlying issue, and there is no permanent water-sharing agreement on the most important river, the Ganges.
Bangladesh is a riparian losing its inadequate water supply to a more powerful riparian, worsening the country’s water shortages, with severe social and economic consequences. Limited resources, together with the basin countries’ demographics, are increasing risks throughout the overpopulated region. The situation is observed by an international community alarmed about military security but lacking clear priority programs for this category of risk. Over 500 million people in three countries depend upon the Ganges for their water. The reduction in the Himalayan snow pack and melting glaciers, the major dry-season water supply to the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers, already affects Bangladesh.
Complicating matters, the Brahmaputra River headwaters lie in Tibet, now part of China. China also claims the bordering Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and recently vigorously protested an Asia Development Bank water-project loan in that Indian state. Both countries have heavily armed the border area, and India has elevated the situation to its most serious military threat, greater even than Pakistan.2 The consequences of climate change on discharge from the Irrawaddy, Salween and Mekong Rivers, which originate in the adjacent elevated areas, may aggravate conditions in the region to the east as well.
Increasing migrations in situations of water-shortage are one symptom of the problem. Eighteen years ago, Malaysia ejected thousands of illegal Bangladeshis then working on its rubber plantations. About that time, Myanmar was fighting Bangladeshi immigrants crossing their border, a conflict that the international media mistakenly identified as a religious dispute. A few years earlier, an Indian official said that his country was going to renegotiate the Ganges agreement that it had imposed on Bangladesh, with a view toward stemming the flow of thousands of Bangladeshis into West Bengal and India’s eastern territories.
The migration pressures in Bangladesh will become worse, as is evident from population projections in its 2002 National Water Plan (Fig. 1). Currently, 73 percent of the population is rural, and 34 percent is under the age of fifteen. There are indications that Bangladesh’s population growth rate is slowing, but recent estimates do not show that. (These are the underlying demographic factors pertinent to most water shortages and will be cited in the other examples.)
Figure1
Bangladesh Population Estimates (millions)
Year |
Total |
Cities & Towns |
Dhaka |
2000 |
129 |
27 |
9 |
2025 |
181 |
73 |
27 |
2050 |
224 |
136 |
40 |
Bangladesh’s population in 2009 is 159 million, the world’s eighth-largest.3 By comparison, the United Kingdom has 61 million inhabitants (replacing the Netherlands in 2008 as the most densely populated European country). Bangladeshis live on an area only 60 percent the size of the UK. Forty to 60 percent of Bangladesh’s lands are inundated annually, while it experiences severe water shortages during the dry season. There is no terrain suitable for the construction of reservoirs to store floodwater. With one of the world’s highest rural population densities, most of its future growth will be in urbanized areas. Others will try to migrate.
In 2000, Dhaka was drawing its water supply from severely overdrafted and polluted aquifers. Sewers served less than 40 percent of the city, and these discharged into a rundown and inadequate primary treatment plant. Chittagong, the second-largest city, like all other cities in the country, lacked sewerage systems: pit latrines and/or drains to waterways were the means of disposal. Villages draw water mostly from open ground-level “tanks” or from wells that are often contaminated by wastes and arsenic, naturally present in the aquifers. (The World Bank is launching a program to upgrade water-related infrastructure in Dhaka and Chittagong with trials in some slums, but no significant increase in the nation’s water supply.)
India refuses tripartite negotiations among the three Ganges riparians. The earlier India-Bangladesh agreement to share the Ganges discharge was replaced in 1998 by an agreement of slightly longer duration. Yet, in 2001, British-built irrigation systems dating from the mid-1800s and the ecologically important Sundarbans area were incurring greater reductions in their Ganges diversions.
The vast majority of the Ganges basin, just as the use of its water, lies within India. It must also be recognized that India faces problems very similar to some of those confronting Bangladesh, except on a larger scale. With a population of 1.17 billion, 71 percent rural, 31 percent below age 15 and an annual growth rate of 1.55 percent, India’s basic water needs are increasing countrywide, with consumption exceeding supply in most areas. It is drawing down its aquifers throughout the Ganges basin, reducing low-season river discharge. For several decades now, the lower reaches of many rivers elsewhere in India have run dry during the low-flow season, affecting all long-established users in the basins. Obviously, all wastewater and irrigation return flows in the country are already fully recycled except in its coastal zone. Desalination has a limited future. India’s terrain permits construction of additional reservoir storage of floodwater, but social and political opposition runs high.
India’s rate of increase in agricultural productivity is not matching its growing food demand as evident in the malnutrition data. The 2009 drought in its primary agricultural area, the northwest region, has severely affected both its rainfed production and some irrigated areas. The option of significantly curtailing its rice irrigation, much of it carried out during the periods of excess precipitation, with water that would otherwise flow to the sea, is limited.
All Ganges riparians are at the mercy of their demographics and the vagaries inherent in a monsoon climate, factors that are at the heart of the region’s situation. It will require much more in addition to water agreements to solve the region’s water problems.
THE NILE RIVER BASIN
The history of water development in the Nile basin offers an example of conflict over colonial water allocations aggravated by high population growth rates. Unfortunately, there are significant discrepancies in the available Nile basin data. The average annual discharge in the lower Nile was assumed to be 84 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 1929, the same volume adopted in subsequent discussions. Eighty-four percent of the Nile’s annual discharge is contributed by the Blue Nile, fed by headwaters in Ethiopia. This flow slackens during the dry season, when the White Nile, which provides most of the remaining 16 percent of annual discharge, contributes a majority of that season’s flow.
Some 226 million people lived in the Nile basin in 2007, a figure expected to increase to 338 million by 2025.4 Of the 10 riparian countries, the two largest claim water-rights priority: Egypt, with a population of 83 million in 2009 and an annual growth rate of 1.64, and Sudan, with a population of 41 million and an annual growth rate of 2.14. Egypt, whose only water source is the Nile, insists that its water rights are senior to those of all riparians based on the 1929 British treaty that ensured Egypt 55.5 bcm of the average annual discharge. Further, the 1929 treaty stipulates that Egypt must be informed of any planned diversions by other riparians and gives it veto power over any proposed actions.
A 1959 agreement between Egypt and Sudan confirmed the allocation of 55.5 bcm to Egypt and provided 18.5 bcm to Sudan, but with all dry-season flow passing on to Egypt, which retained veto power. Sudan also was to reduce much of the assumed 10 bcm evaporation, largely from its Sud swamps (estimated by others to be 50 percent), by channeling the river. But international environmental protests halted construction. Any loss from allocation to upstream riparians that Egypt and Sudan might approve would be shared equally.
Today Ethiopia, with a 2009 population of 85 million and a growth rate of 3.21, and other upper riparians hope to develop projects to help meet their basic goals. Three World Bank-funded basin undertakings are underway. Egypt has agreed to allow Ethiopia to develop a 100,000 hectares irrigation project by pumping water from Lake Tana. Ethiopia and Sudan will jointly exploit hydrogenation, and Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan are investigating a multipurpose floodwater storage and hydro- and limited irrigation development (utilizing a portion of any additional stored water) on the Blue Nile. Meanwhile, the Bank continues efforts to help negotiate a broader basin-reallocation agreement, but a draft concluded in June 2009 was rejected by Egypt and Sudan in August 2009, with both reiterating their established positions.
Food shortages and social unrest will increase within the region. More ominous, the 10-year drought that Egypt experienced in the 1980s almost completely emptied the Aswan Reservoir before upper-basin rains returned in 1989. Egypt’s population was only 50 million when the drought ended. The international community risks massive migration and human crisis during the next prolonged drought — if not earlier.
THE MIDDLE EAST
Sovereignty over an adequate and reliable supply of water is critical to the viability of all countries and a particular concern for those located in the harsh climate of the Middle East and North Africa. The Arab countries have the least renewable water supply per capita of any region in the world.5 Tensions run high within this area of unequally distributed water resources, under stress even during periods of average precipitation. The control of water could be a devastating weapon in Middle East conflicts.6
The coastal Mediterranean lands and the mountains of Turkey and Iran are the most favorably endowed with water. The Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, which have their headwaters in these two countries, are the largest in the region and serve as the principal sources of water for southern Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Resources are much more dispersed elsewhere in the region.
Precipitation supports limited rainfed crops and pastures within the interiors of Iraq, Syria, and Jordan and the mountainous area of historical Palestine. It is the source of the recharge of local and international aquifers in the coastal areas and the mountains.7 The Litani in Lebanon, the Yarmuk originating in Jordan and Syria, and the Jordan are the primary rivers internal to the southwestern part of the Middle East, where shortages have the greatest impact on residents. The Jordan River is the most important and derives essentially all of its water from springs originating at the base of Mount Hermon, which lies entirely within Lebanon and Syria. The Mediterranean Sea offers an unlimited potential of desalinated supply to the coastal strip.
The World Water Council report estimates the renewable water available per person in the 20 Arab countries for the years 1990 and 2025, defining three levels of stress: periodic, chronic and absolute.8 Jordan was already in a condition of absolute water stressin 1990, consuming more from surface supplies and over-pumped aquifers than is replenished by precipitation. Lebanon is in periodic stress today and will be under chronic stress by 2025, with Syria joining Jordan at a level of absolute stress in that year. The estimates for Syria do not fully reflect Turkey’s retention of Euphrates River water. The Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are included in the category of countries with the least water supply per person. These conditions reflect past average annual precipitation. But because much of the region has limited long-term water-storage capacity, the inevitable lengthy droughts will create widespread human, economic and security crises in the region.
The Middle East provides two examples of powerful countries dictating the allocation of water resources among riparians. The first is a case of unilateral actions by one riparian with devastating impact already imposed on the others. Turkey’s massive Southwest Anatolia Project on the Euphrates and its ongoing development of the Tigris River have severely reduced the millennia-old supply to the other riparians. Earlier estimates indicated that Syria would lose 30 to 40 percent and Iraq 60 to 80 percent of their supply from the Euphrates. Others believe Syria will ultimately lose 50 percent and Iraq will lose 90 percent.9 Turkey’s development on the Tigris would further affect Iraq’s supply from this source. Iran has limited opportunity to utilize water from the Tigris tributaries, but its recent developments on smaller streams flowing into Iraq diminish discharge to Iraq’s southeastern borderlands. The basin’s naturally erratic quantities of precipitation complicate estimates of reliable supplies, both past and future.10 But, by 1993, the consequences of Turkey’s diversions already were evident in Iraq’s irrigation projects and its southern marshes.11
The severe water stress in Syria and Iraq has worsened during the past three years, when precipitation has diminished to less than 50 percent of the average annual quantity. In 2008, Iraq’s precipitation was only 30 percent, while most of Iraq is under absolute stress and suffering economic and social unease. In 2008, The Times of London reported large-scale internal migration as a result.12 At a tri-country meeting on September 3, 2009, reported by The Anatolia News Agency,13 the Iraqi minister of water resources warned that southern Iraq faced mass migration. A basin agreement remains only talk. The lower riparians’ desperate situation today presents the world community with a highly volatile international security situation.
The second example of one riparian unilaterally allocating a basin’s water resources involves Israel’s use of its international political clout and military power to dictate an outcome. This is also the one basin where the world community, particularly the United States, has played a strong supporting role to the dominant riparian. (Israel’s strategy and actions have been recorded by Israel, the United Nations and member governments in books and papers that provide extensive references.)
The objective of Zionist and subsequent Israeli actions over the past 90 years has not been in response to any evolving water shortage that arose before or after the creation of the Israel.14 It has been a strategy, confirmed in Israeli documents, to garner control of the water resources of Palestine and some of those belonging to neighboring riparians as a means to attain a quite different goal: ownership of all of Palestine. Methodical actions entailed military force, deportation of people and confiscation of assets in violation of the UN Charter, UN resolutions and other international instruments governing war, water resources and human rights. The world community’s 60 years of acceptance of these actions establishes a dangerous international precedent for resolving situations in all regions with insufficient resources and the inevitable risks to international security posed by this precedent. The following summary provides a chronological background of the strategy.
The Zionists’ water strategy began with the 1917 Balfour Declaration and Chaim Weizmann’s 1919 boundary request (later used in UN Resolution 181) to Britain’s prime minister.15 This was followed in the 1930s and 1940s by deliberations by David Ben Gurion16 and others17 concerning the Palestinians’ robust economy and population and the difficulty of removing the Arabs from Palestine,18 as well as by attacks launched by terrorist organizations on the Palestinians and British.19
UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution, 181 partitioned Palestine in 1947 and, though Arabs owned 93 percent of Palestine, the United Nations awarded 56 percent, with key water resources, to the Zionists. The British left prematurely, and the Zionists launched the 1948 war. Ultimately, the world community acquiesced to Israel’s expansion of its area to 78 percent of Palestine and its forced deportation of 750,000 Palestinians during that war.20
Although Israel’s watershed produces only 2 percent of the Jordan River’s annual discharge, UNSC Resolution 181 relocated Israel’s boundary with Syria from the center of the river to a line east of the river including Lake Tiberius, violating the boundaries, access and water rights that Syria and Jordan acquired through centuries of use. In 1955, Israel launched its National Carrier pipeline and by 1964 was pumping 75 percent of the Jordan River to lands lying outside of the Jordan basin, violating the provisions of international water laws.
Menachem Begin and others later confirmed that the 1967 war was launched not because of Egypt, but as a cover to occupy the Golan Heights,21 and the rest of Palestine,22 establish martial law and deport an additional 200,000 Palestinian Arabs. Israel promptly nationalized the water resources of the Occupied Territories in order to control all West Bank uses. Jordan suffers from past reallocations as well as from Israel’s opposition to Jordanian and Syrian plans to construct a reservoir on the Yarmuk River.
Today Israel consumes over 95 percent of the fresh water available to historic Palestine, leaving the Palestinians less than 5 percent. In 2004, 56 percent of Israel’s supply was used in agriculture, which contributed only 1.6 percent of Israel’s GDP and employed two percent of its workforce.23 Israel has proven that affordable desalinated Mediterranean seawater can serve its coastal strip.24 Desalination, together with a reduction of Israeli’s irrigation, could free substantial quantities of water for a state of Palestine.
The massive expulsions imposed upon neighboring countries remain unaddressed by the international community.25 In the course of the two wars, 950,000 Palestinians were driven from their lands and water. The number of registered Arab reugees in 2000 totaled 3,900,000 with 1.8 million still confined to refugee camps.26 Conditions are little better for the 1,600,000 Arab citizens of Israel living within its boundaries. Susan Nathan described their conditions in 2004:27
After more than five decades of aggressive land confiscation policies toward Palestinian Arabs, 93 percent of the land is owned either by the state or the Jewish National Fund. . . . This, in itself unremarkable, is significant because the land is held by the state not for the benefit of its “citizens,” all Israelis, but in trust for the Jewish people (“nationals”) [in Israel and] around the world. . . . The rest, 7 percent, is split between private Jewish and Arab owners.
Every effort to formulate a two-state solution has failed, leaving ever-more-harsh conditions for the Palestinian Arabs. It is highly revealing that neither the United States in its negotiating role, nor the United Nations or the world community, has even conducted a comprehensive study to determine the minimum land, water and other resources necessary to create an economically viable, sustainable, sovereign state of Palestine. This should be a basic first step. A self-sufficient Palestine will require more of the land promised by the United Nations in 1948 than the shreds comprising the pre-1967 border and an allocation of a reliable water supply to meet its social and economic needs.
The Likud party has long presented Israel’s positions (see 2009 posting on the Internet),28 which are the same as those declared 28 years ago by Foreign Minister Yizhak Shamir in The New York Times on July 8, 1981:
Camp David (under President Carter’s administration) left no doubt that Israel would accept no autonomy agreement that would put a stop to new Israel settlements in ‘the territories’. . . . We are against . . . Palestinian Arab self-determination, because the Palestinian Arabs already have their state, which is Jordan. The Palestinian movement, in time, will disappear. There is no other possibility.29
Today, direct U.S. economic and military aid to Israel continues.
Studies show that Israel can free up water for a state of Palestine. Israeli technical experts have explored the country’s water situation for many years, noting what sources may have to be transferred under peace agreements to meet the crisis in the affected countries. They have identified reliable sources sufficient to replace water Israel now uses that was taken in the course of the conflicts (Rubin; Glueckstern, 2001; Schwartz, 2001; Shelef, 2001; Soffer, 2001; Wiseburgh, 2001; and Zur, 2001).30 Peter Wiseburgh states in the preface to the Israeli report, Efficient Use of Limited Water Resources,
Bearing in mind the increasing vital strategic importance of water in relationship with our Arab neighbors, whose problems are greater than ours and who regularly experience water-supply shut-off, it might be beneficial to think in regional rather than in local terms.31
The history of the Middle East and the world community’s supporting role have created a darker aspect to international security risks that can only become more grave under the looming inevitable water crises — unless there is a reversal of past actions.
The fifth example of complications in reaching agreements to allocate water among riparians in water-short river basins involves potential pressure from wealthy foreign countries. Such non-riparian countries are acquiring the water and land resources needed to produce food for their domestic consumption through the purchase or long-term leasing of land and water in poor riparian countries that already lack sufficient water to meet their own needs.
According to The Economist,32 several countries have recently acquired millions of hectares of food-producing lands and water in other countries. As the article explains, this activity risks socially, economically and politically destabilizing consequences. “Over the past two years, as much as 20 million hectares [50 million acres] of farmland in poor countries have been quietly handed over to countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and China.” Saudi investors have spent $100 million to raise cereals on leased land in Ethiopia, tax-exempt initially, and are permitted to export the entire crop back to Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the World Food Program is implementing a $116 million food aid program to Ethiopia extending from 2007 through 2011.
China has secured 2.8 million hectares (ha) in the Congo for palm-oil production and is negotiating for two million ha in Zambia. In Sudan alone, South Korea has signed deals for 690,000 ha, the UAE for 400,000 ha, and Egypt for a similar number. A Sudanese official stated that Sudan has set aside one-fifth of its cultivated lands, the largest in Africa, for Arab governments. Libya is leasing 100,000 ha for rice in Mali. Cambodia leased land to Kuwaiti investors last year. All of these actions were completed within just the last two years. This introduces powerful pressures on legal riparians seeking to resolve an equitable allocation of basin water.
With this new “outsourcing” of crop production to meet domestic needs, cash-strong governments secure food for themselves while offering little expertise and insignificant trade development for the local populations. Indeed, many farmers without land titles are removed, decreasing employment and increasing poverty and urban slums. As is obvious and mentioned in the Economist article, the dominant objective of these actions is to secure water to grow crops, not just land.
These politically and economically powerful countries will exert strong pressures and politics into water negotiations among the legal riparians in the basins in which such ventures are launched. Obviously, the Nile basin is one. The structure and size of these ventures, the objective of which is to export production, preclude the local country from utilizing the involved land and water resources to develop its own economy. Substantial incentives will likely be made available to the governments. Madagascar’s citizens overthrew their government and cancelled such moves in their country in April 2009, but that may be an exception, at least at the outset. But as populations grow, such arrangements risk additional regional and basin instabilities.
ALLOCATION AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT
The world community cannot avoid its responsibilities to seek equitable allocation of international water resources among riparians and, separately, to help deal with calamities arising from severe prolonged water shortages in disputed basins. The triggers — growing water shortages — are inevitable. Present and projected demographics, essentially fixed resources and limited economic opportunities for the various riparians, clearly identify the world’s problem areas. A recent limited public-opinion poll conducted in 15 countries indicates that 90 percent view water issues as more important than any others, even climate change. Pollution and shortages were those most often cited in developing countries.33
The water problems in developing countries differ in important ways from those discussed in many of the developed countries. Seldom are navigation and fisheries major issues, but rather the adequacy of available basic water supplies. The solution is not a matter of changing household water use. There is absolutely no cushion for any unnecessary water use now. The often-mentioned drip irrigation technology is not an option for rice lands or field crops, including the other cereals that constitute the largest class of food crops in the cited regions and throughout the world. Typically, excess seepage into the underlying groundwater is already being recovered by pumping. Most of these countries also depend upon production from unreliable rain-fed agriculture. New technologies, irrigation methods or agronomic findings offer insignificant help for the immediate crises.
The resolution of these situations will inevitably call for the world community to undertake the following: (a) a detailed plan with designated resources to deal with the potential human and economic calamity; (b) construction of basin infrastructure to develop additional supplies, primarily capturing floodwater but also including regional conveyances, improved conjunctive use of groundwater, and facilities for urban supply and recovery of usable water from wastewater; (c) limited but essential technical and institutional assistance; (d) infrastructure financing; (e) the likely longer-term financing of country needs and (f) the important provision of intermediaries/negotiators at the level of country leaders. Agreements among riparians should seek the joint ownership/benefits of major storage facilities. Every riparian should institute an accelerated, effective family-planning program as needed. There are other functions as well. The community’s efforts should reflect that these crises exist in 2009, not 2030.
Haiti illustrates the vexing problems of dealing with over-population, inadequate resources and limited economic options. The world community has provided a scattering of funds, development aid and peacekeeping services to Haiti for decades. Yet the social, humanitarian, economic and political conditions match the most wretched in the world, while illegal emigration mounts. Though giving assistance of every type to remedy the Haitian catastrophe, the community’s formal agencies, the assignment of their responsibilities and the measures that have been taken have proven to be lacking. Similar attempts in Africa, Asia and the Middle East have fallen short. Indeed, the community has watched the five water-related crises noted herein evolve over decades but initiated no effective remedial actions.
Today a range of programs have been enacted to deal with the impact of unsustainable population growth relative to an area’s available resources. These focus on the environment, climate change and energy consumption are part of the public debate and allotted massive community funding. The efforts are directed at the highest leadership of many agencies and government ministries.
At the same time, the United Nations, the development banks and other entities have no programs at a high level of a comparable scale to address the international water-related crises represented above, even though they also are caused by population growth outpacing resources. The international agencies engaged in some aspects of water crises seem to have mixed results for several reasons, including their charters, policies, funding, internal capability and, to varying extents, politics. Perhaps this is because the environmental, energy and climate-change concerns are not country specific, community politics are minimal and financing demands limited when compared to the water crises.
Some specific constraints upon international agencies working in areas bearing on water crises can be seen. The Daily Press Briefing of the UN secretary-general’s office on May 27, 2009, clearly describes that day’s humanitarian situation, problems, and UN efforts in eight countries. This illustrates the extensive local needs and numerous agencies engaged in similar aspects of the problems. The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)’s Emergency Appeal for 2009 calls for $275 million to aid refugees in Gaza and the West Bank — essential to relieve this humanitarian disaster — and a request for the community’s help to remedy its causes. These are not sudden needs. Yet the community’s response in dealing with the causes and the financing are inadequate. This UNRWA request confirms the inability to enforce UN resolutions and other international instruments if a Security Council member desires to veto the actions.
The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has had varying success over the past 50 years with family planning. Several countries with unsustainable growth are evident in the examples crises. China was perhaps the first to independently adopt an effective family-planning policy with the goal of reducing pressures on its resources. Through a national program of education and massive distribution of condoms, Thailand has reduced its 2009 population growth rate to 0.615, with only 20.8 percent below age 15. Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country and the fifth-largest country in the world, is pursuing a program based upon Thailand’s, resulting in lowered indices of 1.14 and 28.1. To help, newspapers displayed photos on their front pages of Indonesia’s president cutting the ribbon on a new condom plant. The Asia-Pacific region has reduced its population growth rate to 1.1. The failures of other countries are only partly due to cultural beliefs. They are primarily due to the lack of simple, effective family-planning programs.
UN entities, regional development banks and the World Bank have boosted economic development, including water and agriculture throughout much of the world. But in recent years they have not kept up with changing conditions, in no small part due to public protests from the developed countries that had already built reservoirs to serve their own needs. Water projects lag behind earlier levels including the urgently needed means to capture the snowmelt as climate change advances. The World Bank’s policy to refrain from funding water development in international basins until the riparians have agreed to an equitable legal agreement is wise. However, this policy, without applying pressures on the powerful riparians’ borrowing for their domestic development, allows conditions to deteriorate for the vulnerable weaker countries.
Additional one-time efforts by the community are of little value. The much publicized 2000 year Millennium Goals pertaining to water were formulated in the course of numerous UN-sponsored meetings of international-agency representatives and government leaders and conferences attended by tens of thousands of participants. World governments made solemn commitments, yet they accomplished little that added to existing efforts by the individual countries.
The International Red Cross has a record of demonstrated programs and a capacity to deal with humanitarian events from tsunamis and earthquakes to displaced people. It effectively monitors and reports on the human-rights questions, including those related to the Geneva Convention. Insufficient funding, however, limits its level of preparedness and capacity to address major unexpected events.
Approaches to solving water issues within a framework of international legal principles and instruments are also essential for the desired long-term results. Riparians have applied them in numerous situations when formulating permanent successful arrangements, some agreements dating back centuries. The UN Charter, its resolutions and the instruments signed by the majority of the world’s countries can constitute a broad framework of principles and acceptable behavior to address water disputes and protect human rights. They offer mechanisms and a venue free of international politics to address any disputes.
A few means are noted that pertain to issues evident in the four regions described above. Instruments relative to disputes over international water resources set forth principles bearing on the responsibilities of the riparian countries, such as exchanging all water-related data, respecting the equity of use by other riparians, meeting the obligation to not cause significant harm to other basin states, refraining from transferring water out of a basin without a resolution of the needs of all other basin riparian countries, and facilitating the submission of conflicts to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for resolution.
Concerning military actions, the Geneva Convention on War prohibits the expulsion of residents from their land and the taking of resources by occupiers. UN Resolution 1803 prohibits the violation of a people’s rights to sovereignty over their natural resources. The Covenant of Human Rights prohibits interference in the use of another people’s natural resources.
The UN Charter stipulates that the ICJ is the principal venue for resolving conflicts among members of the United Nations. Three articles of the UN Charter describe the status of the Court.
Article 92: “The International Court of Justice shall be the principal judicial organ of the United Nations.”
Article 93: “1. All Members of the United Nations are ipso facto parties to the Statute of the International Court of Justice.”
Article 94: “1. Each Member of the United Nations undertakes to comply with the decision of the International Court of Justice. 2. If any party to a case fails to perform the obligations. . . the other party may have recourse . . . to give effect to the judgment.”
Unfortunately, a negotiating framework is not easily accepted by developing countries approaching or already in crisis. Success will depend on the willingness, availability and strength of the senior domestic political and equivalent international leadership involved. With exceptions such as the lower Mekong River sponsored by the United Nations, many such efforts to guide agreements among developing countries have proven marginal. Even under the Mekong River settlement, reached after decades of UN engagement, questions have arisen, and China and Myanmar remain outside of and unrestrained by the agreement.
The question would appear to be this: what entity can step forward and effectively undertake the assignment before more international-security crises involving water conditions arise? Though seemingly a logical choice, the United Nations has proven to be hampered by permanent constraints and not sufficiently agile to meet the immediate challenges. Further, the veto powers held by individual members of the Security Council can dictate the UN’s actions.
It would seem that the execution of comprehensive programs to ameliorate future and existing water crises will require a permanent, stable, well-funded, stand-alone entity. The entity should bring expertise and stature in crisis management, resource development, project funding, long-term finance and conflict negotiations. The 1960 Indus Water Agreement between Pakistan and India is an example where such an effort was successful. Following a dispute with India in 1948, Pakistan requested that the World Bank lend its offices to help negotiate a treaty on the allocation of transboundary water in the Indus River basin. Negotiations from 1952 to 1960 led to an agreement that entailed construction of several major dams, canals and diversion works, most financed by the World Bank. This agreement was instrumental in ensuring peace and permanent water allocations, essential for the long-term development of Pakistan and India’s northwest.
Eugene Black, president of the World Bank, with early support from David Lilienthal, past chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, was the lead outside negotiator. Black had the standing and ability to keep the negotiations focused, offering refinements as judged helpful, and it was his work directly with the country leaders that was the catalyst and facilitated the joint formulation of provisions that in the end were accepted. The Bank signed the agreement as a third party. It also brought water-resources development expertise and the essential project financing and bilateral funding.
Perhaps an independent entity with a small board of directors consisting of the presidents of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the International Crisis Group (ICG), the International Red Cross and one designated UN relief agency would best fulfill the need. To avoid organizational pressures, the ICG could identify candidates for president of the entity to be selected by the board. Community agencies represented on the board, as others, would continue working in their areas while supporting and executing specific components of the new entity’s programs. The entity would have a moderately sized staff of very senior people highly experienced in the most demanding fields with the status essential to meet the challenges. The entity would draw on independent international experts as judged helpful. The world community could follow the funding mechanisms adopted for the United Nations and other international agencies to fund a new entity.
The urgency of these international security crises should call for an early effort to resolve the question.
2The New York Times, September 4, 2009.
3 Ibid.
5 Mahmoud Abu-Zeid and A. Hamdy, Water Vision for the Twenty-First Century in the Arab World, (Water World Council, 2002), pg. 15.
6 Harald Frederiksen. “Water: Israeli Strategy, Implications for Peace and the Viability of Palestine,” Middle East Policy, Vol.X, No. 4, Winter 2003.
7 “Middle East Water; Critical Resource,” National Geographic Magazine, May 1993.
8 Mahmoud Abu-Zeid and A. Hamdy, op. cit., pg. 30.
9 Diane R. Ward, Water Wars: Drought, Flood Folly and the Politics of Thirst (Penguin, 2002 ). pp. 174-178.
10 John F. Kolar and William A. Mitchell, The Euphrates River and The Southwest Anatolia Development Project (Southern Illinois University Press, 1998).
11 “Middle East Water; Critical Resource,” National Geographic Magazine, May 1993.
12 The Times OnLine, 7/29/08.
13http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-09/03/content_11992315.htm.
14 Frederiksen, op. cit., p. 69 - 86; Harald Frederiksen, “A Federation of Palestine and Jordan: A Chance for Peace?” Middle East Policy, Vol. XIV, No. 2, Summer 2007, p. 30–43.
15Water Resources of the Occupied Territories (United Nations, 1992).
16 Nur Masalha, Expulsion of The Palestinians (Institute for Palestinian Studies, 1992), pp. 18, 180.
17 Ibid. p. 59 and 134.
18 Frederiksen, “Water: Israeli Strategy,” op. cit., pp. 74-76
19www.Times online.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article690085.ece, July, 6, 2006.
20 Walid Khalidi, All That Remains — The Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Institute of Palestine Studies, 1992), p. xxxi; Susan Nathan, The Other Side of Israel; My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide, (Random House, 2005).
21 “I know how at least 80 percent of all . . .” quoted in “Aggression, Expansion & Israel’s Terriorism, Part II” found at http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7891/index_zion2.html.
22 Frederiksen, “Water: Israeli Strategy,” op. cit., p. 80.
23 Israel Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, “Israeli Agriculture: Facts and Figures, 2004,” Agriculture in 2004.
24 Barry Ruben, Efficient Use of Limited Water Resources; Making Israel a Model State, The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University, 2001.
25 Harald Frederiksen, “ Water: Israeli Strategy,” op. cit., p. 76.
26 “West Bank: Lines in the Sand,” National Geographic Magazine, October, 2002.
27 Susan Nathan, op. cit., p.144.
28http://www.knesset.gov.il/elections/knesset15/elikud_m.htm, August 31, 2009.
29 John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), pp. 24-40,
30 Barry Ruben, op.cit.
31 Ibid.
32The Economist, May 23, 2009.
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