 The Blue Gold - Water Scarcity and Water Wars.
“Africa’s Lake Chad,” writes Lester R. Brown, founder and president of the
Earth Policy Institute, “once a landmark for astronauts circling the earth, is
now difficult for them to locate.” The lake, surrounded by fast-growing
countries such as Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, has shrunk 96% in 40 years.
“The shrinkage of Lake Chad is not unique,” notes Dr. Brown, one of America’s
leading environmentalists and author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save
Civilization. “The world is incurring a vast water deficit.” The flow of
the Jordan River is also steadily diminishing – along with those of the Yellow
River in China, the Mekong in Southeast Asia, the Amu Darya in Central Asia and
the Colorado River in the United States. And, as the Jordan River decreases, the
Dead Sea is also shrinking. Over the past 40 years, its water level has dropped
by some 25 meters and it is estimated it could disappear entirely by the year
2050.  Considering the extent of the problem, it shouldn’t be surprising that the 1999 UNDP study forecasts that should water wars occur, they would most likely break out in regions where rivers or lakes are shared by more than one country. Lester R. Brown agrees. “Nowhere is this potential conflict (over water) starker than among Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia in the Nile River valley.”
The Nile River Basin is a reservoir of water covering 1.3 million square miles, a surface slightly larger than the territory of India. There are ten riparian countries to the Nile River, the longest running in the world: Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and Eritrea. However, three of them – Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia – account for 85% of the territory that constitutes the hydrologic boundaries of the basin. Whereas 95% of Egyptians rely exclusively on the Nile for their water supply and 77% of Sudan’s fresh water comes via the river, the Nile originates in Ethiopia and controls 85% of its headwaters. “Ethiopia is an interesting case,” says an economist with the Ministry of Water Resources in Addis Ababa who asked not to be identified by name, “since its economic fate is closely tied to unreliable rainfall and since 90% of its water resources are 'trans-boundary,’ which means that rivers flow into other countries that inevitably oppose upstream development that might reduce their own resources.” The already high demand for water in the region is projected to increase steadily through the next forty years. The population in Egypt, today at 75 million, should reach 121 million by 2050. Sudan is expected to have 73 million people by 2050, almost double today’s 39 million. And the number of Ethiopians is projected to grow from 83 million to 183 million. Population growth is not the only factor of stress on the region’s water resources. David Shinn, former ambassador to Burkina Faso and Ethiopia and professor of International Affairs at George Washington University, told Washington Prism in an interview, “Irrigation projects are the greatest threat to the future of amicable Nile water usage. Big irrigation projects simply use so much water that never returns to the river system.”
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