People go to war when their way of life is threatened. I have written before about the many issues we face in the coming years that threaten our way of life. These include global warming/climate change, pollution, pandemics, nuclear bombs, intelligent machines, genetics, and more.
More and more I am becoming convinced that the next major regional/global conflict will be over water. We are much more likely to have water wars in the next decade than nuclear ones.
And I were to guess, I’d say that it is most likely to happen in around North East Africa. This is a region with its own internal issues. But it also has the foreign involvement of America, China, the Middle Eastern Arab nations, and (increasingly) Israel. Quite a potent mix…
Last week, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia hosted the 18th regular meeting of the Council of Ministers of Water Affairs of the Nile Basin countries. In the lead up to the conference, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, the five countries that are all upstream of Egypt and Sudan concluded a water-sharing treaty – to the exclusion of Egypt and Sudan. This has obviously reignited the longstanding dispute over water distribution of the world’s longest river in the world’s driest continent.
Egypt is currently the largest consumer of Nile water and is the main beneficiary of a 1929 treaty which allows it to take 55.5 billion cubic metres of water each year, or 87% of the White and Blue Nile’s flow. By contrast, Sudan is only allowed to draw 18.5 billion cubic metres.
On attaining independence Sudan refused to acknowledge the validity of the Nile water treaty and negotiated a new bilateral treaty with Egypt in 1959. Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda also expressly refused to be bound by the treaty when they attained independence, but have not negotiated a new treaty since then.
Under the 1929 treaty, Egypt has powers over upstream projects: The Nile Waters Agreement of 1929 states that no country in the Nile basin should undertake any works on the Nile, or its tributaries, without Egypt’s express permission. This gives Egypt a veto over anything, including the building of dams on numerous rivers in Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and by implication Egypt has control over agriculture, industry and infrastructure and basic services such as drinking water and electricity in these countries. This is surely untenable. But if the other countries broke the treaty, would Egypt respond with force?
Since the late 1990s, Nile Basin states have been trying unsuccessfully to develop a revised framework agreement for water sharing, dubbed the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI).
In May 2009, talks held in Kinshasa broke down because Egypt and Sudan’s historical water quotas were not mentioned in the text of the proposed agreement. Water ministers met again in July 2009 in Alexandria, where Egypt and Sudan reiterated their rejection of any agreement that did not clearly establish their historical share of water. This is an untenable position.
Upstream states accuse Egypt and Sudan of attempting to maintain an unfair, colonial-era monopoly on the river. Egyptian officials and analysts, however, defend their position, pointing out that Egypt is much more dependent on the river for its water needs than its upstream neighbours. Egypt claims that Nile water accounts for more than 95% of Egypt’s total water consumption, although they appear to be working hard to reduce both their water usage (they’re stopping growing rice, for example) and their dependence on the Nile.
This is going to end in tears.
Graeme,
The Nile water conflict is fascinating. But I don’t see wars being fought over water. I think nuclear war is a much bigger threat than water wars.
My reasoning is as follows: water is a very cheap commodity, almost the cheapest there is. Even if natural fresh water is not available, water can be produced relatively cheaply from energy by deslination. In comparison with almost any other natural resource we need to live, water is both abundantly available and not regionally concentrated. These factors have a few implications. Firstly, rich countries will never lack water because they can always buy energy, which is a substitute for water resources. Secondly, water can be transported easily by pipeline or other methods and therefore redistributed, although once you start looking at moving water a long way then it quickly becomes more efficient to transport goods that require water rather than the water itself – mainly food. And finally, water is such a basic human requirement that international organisations such as the UN would intervene long before water shortages became critcal (assuming one country was withholding water from another) in much the same way as the international community acts over food shortages. In fact food aid is often a result of water shortages of course.
My view is that water could certainly be a trigger for conflict but I don’t see water as being valuable enough to cause wars. Wars require much more basic cultural and historical drivers. I guess the Golan Heights could be an example of water conflict causing war but the differences there were much more deep-seated and historic.
ps I can’t see Egypt stopping rice production. It is the biggest rice producer in the Middle East and rice can be grown on marginal land affected by salinity. The government has banned rice exports in the last few years to protect domestic supply but it’s a really important crop.
Tim,
Thanks for your comments and insights. Thanks for clarifying the issue of nuclear war vs water wars. In terms of the severity of these two types of wars, of course you right that a nuclear war is a much bigger threat. I was referring to likelihood of such a war happening, and I think a water war is more likely.
So, at that point I must disagree with you. You say that water is a cheap resource, but it is not. The amount of drinkable water on the planet is less than 1% of the total water resources of the planet. This scarcity is reflected in the fact that bottled water is more expensive than oil or petrol in almost every country in the world. If it isn’t (as in Greece, for example), it’s because the government subsidises water and imposes an artificial maximum price. Check out your local filling station and see if I am right.
Desalination is not yet an option because it is prohibitively expensive and can’t be done at scale. I think you will be the world’s next billionaire if you find a cheap technology for desalination! Seriously, I do. And, of course, the scarcer water becomes, the more viable it will be to find technology solutions for desalination. So, it will happen. But not soon enough for water poor countries.
You have a higher view of the UN’s ability to intervene than I do, I am afraid.
Your point about Egypt rice production is well taken, and I agree with you.
Thanks!
Nothing like a good debate, and as a chem engineer and economist I can’t resist responding:
The realisation of mutally assured annihilation does make nuclear war unlikely in a conflict between two states acting rationally, but you can imagine scenarios where escalation between Israel and Iran/Syria/Lebanon escalates to the point where a nuke is launched. In comparison a major war between countries over water is much less likely. But there’s a category error in this discussion (comparing a weapon of war with a cause for war) so lets move on.
Regarding the scarcity of water – you can’t avoid that water is abundant on the planet. So abundant that in most industrial processes and much of agricultural production it is a free or nearly free input. If this were to change and water had a economically significant cost then the entire structure of human existence would need to change unrecogisably – where we grow food and livestock, what we eat, how and where we manufacture goods, and so on. Remember we live on the “blue planet” so 1% of all water on earth is a huge amount of water. Even in the poorest and driest countries, water for personal use is free or almost free (but may off course require a lot of wasted time and energy to collect it).
The price of bottled water is no indication of the scarcity of water itself. When we buy water in a filling station we are buying convenience, packaging, something cold, and perhaps some brand value if you go for Evian. I’d guess that the cost of the actual water in the bottle is about 0.1% of the purchase price. And bottled water is not priced based on its total delivered cost, but on what people are prepared to pay, and here it is important that water is a substitute for all the other refrigerated drinks in the store (Coke, milk, Tropicana). No convenience store with any concept of profit would sell a viable substitute for a cold bottle of Coke at anything less than a similar price.
And to compare water with petrol or oil at a filling station you need to compare like with like, so either compare water from the tap (free) with petrol from the pump (£1.2/L), or water in a bottle (£1.2/L) with oil in a bottle (£5/L plus?). If petrol was sold in a bottle it would be a similar price to oil.
Finally, desalination. Desalination is widespread and cheap. Almost all countries in the Middle East and North Africa rely on desalination, as does California, Australia and even Thames Water in London! Desalination costs are typically less than $1/1000L so cheap if used for human consumption (and too expensive for most farming). But scale and infrastructure are important, so desalination (and water supply) is a job for government.
Finally, to bring my discussion full circle, desalination is very energy intensive which is bad for GHG emissions and climate change, so maybe one day we’ll see nuclear-powered desalination plants? The World Nuclear Associaton is already pushing the idea! http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf71.html Talk about turning swords into ploughshares!