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Oil or water? Getting our priorities rightBy Darryl D'Monte

Worldwatch's new Vital Signs2006-2007seems more concerned with rising oilprices than with depleting water resources

Vital Signs2006-2007: The Trends that are Shaping Our Future

Worldwatch InstituteWW Norton, New York, 2006, 160pp

One always greets a new publication of Worldwatch with a mixture of excitementand disappointment. Excitement, because it tracks many global trends andproduces telling facts and figures which are grist to the mill of any environmentalist,wherever s/he is located. But there is also disappointment, because of theassumption in the very title of this Washington-based NGO: the claim that itrepresents the aspirations of the entire globe, where people's needs are so diverse.

The latest Vital Signs 2006-2007 is no different in this respect. Basing itself on theUN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year analysis of the world'secosystems, written by some 1,300 scientists, it takes a broad overview ofdisturbing trends in several natural resources.

If one wanted to pose the problem with such US-based think-tanks and theirworldviews, one could ask the question: Which is more important, the shortage ofoil or the shortage of water? No prizes for guessing which Worldwatch is moreconcerned with. In its preface, the book cites how the price of oil, hovering around $70, is obstructing the path to a new energy transition. Indeed, the world now needs83 million barrels a day and new discoveries are not sufficient to keep pace with thisdemand, which is growing inexorably at 2% per year.

As someone who attends international environmental conferences regularly, I amoften asked: What is the biggest environment problem in the world? My unfailinganswer over the last few years has been: the shortage of water. Disturbingly,Worldwatch doesn't even list this among the 'Key Indicators' in its book. It coversfood, energy, economic trends, transport, health and social trends, and conflict. But

one simply cannot afford to ignore the water issue because it impacts everyone'slives, particularly -- but by no means exclusively -- in the developing world.

If one takes food itself, there is a serious underlying water dimension, as mostgrain-growing countries spend 70% and more of their water resources on irrigation.Only recently, the Earth Policy Institute, run by Worldwatch founder Lester Brown,reported: "Together, China, India and the United States produce nearly half theworld's grain, and these three countries plus Pakistan collectively account for overthree-fourths of the world's reported groundwater extraction for agriculturalpurposes."

It would be interesting to study how countries that import food and vegetables andfruit are, in fact, using -- virtually speaking -- the water resources of countries wherethese are grown. This is why several radical ecologists believe that the world shouldswitch from being "omnivores" (Ramchandra Guha's apposite expression) toconsuming what is grown locally, as far as possible. Apart from putting a strain onthe world's water, global patterns of consumption take a toll of the atmosphere(when food is airlifted) or pollute the oceans (when it is shipped).

Admittedly this is easier said than done, given the tendency of even developingcountries to import New Zealand apples or exotic Kiwi fruit and the like.

The Earth Policy Institute recognises that, "aquifers are being overexploited in majorfood-producing regions, including the north China plain, a region that yields half of

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China's wheat and one-third of its corn; Punjab, Haryana and other highlyproductive agricultural states in northern India; and the southern great plains of theUnited States, a major grain-producing region". The destruction of what is probablythe most productive wheat-growing region in the entire world -- Punjab and Haryana-- is well documented in a book released last year by Shripad Dharmadhikary, whohas studied how the much-vaunted Bhakra dam, supposedly the harbinger of the

Green Revolution, did not contribute as much grain as was believed. What's more,the pattern of high-input farming adopted in the region has led to severewaterlogging and salinity there.

Simply put, the world's population doubled in the second half of the 20th century,while water consumption trebled. If irrigation accounts globally for 70% of the water,industry sucks up 20% and households the remaining 10%. This has put anenormous load on all waterbodies -- surface as well as aquifers. Two rivers -- theAmu Darya in central Asia and Colorado in the US -- no longer flow perennially. TheDead Sea, true to its name, has dropped an alarming 25 metres in the last 40years. Cities like Shanghai and Kolkata also rely heavily on groundwater, whileChennai has to turn to tankers for its needs (possibly the worst case of its kind inthe world).

It is a pity that Worldwatch only devotes two pages of the concluding chapter,'Economy and Social Features', to water and sanitation. If water is ignored,sanitation is usually treated as taboo -- certainly in the industrial world, where it isn'tan issue for the most part, but even in developing countries, where it is a majorcontributor to ill health.

In this context, it is disturbing to learn that the major advocacy group on sanitation,the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), which haslaunched the innovative WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for All) campaign, isin the doldrums. The executive director of this multi-stakeholder Geneva-basedorganisation till recently was Gourisankar Ghosh, who made a name for himselfwhen he headed the Water Technology Mission under Rajiv Gandhi and SamPitroda. It has single-handedly succeeded in getting sanitation included as anenvironmental Millennium Development Goal -- to halve the number of people in the

world without sanitation, a staggering 2.6 billion, by 2015.

I wonder if sanitation has ever figured in a major way in Worldwatch's 'State of theWorld' reports orVital Signs, which I have been looking at for at least 15 years. Noone in the West is in the least concerned with sanitation because virtually everyhousehold has at least one toilet. But in poor countries, the lack of sanitation andhygiene is responsible for thousands of lives lost due to water contamination.

Even in rich countries, the perception that people are aware of the connectionbetween hygiene and health is not necessarily true. Studies by experts from theLondon School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine show that even in the UK, amajority of mothers do not wash their hands after they have changed their babies'nappies. The less said about the situation in developing countries, which have tocombat not only the shortage of water but illiteracy, the better.

Worldwatch would do well to pay some attention to this most vital sign of the world'swellbeing, or lack of it. If it did, it would surely realise that wherever we are in thisworld, we are blindly following a three-century-old technology for sewerage. Whatwe are doing is taking a relatively small amount of human waste, and, by flushing itthrough a sewage system, squandering water that is usually purified to potablelevels. This magnifies the amount of waste several-fold. It is only in some Europeancountries, notably Sweden, that experts are turning their minds to "ecologicalsanitation", where the water employed is drastically reduced and the human waste-- solid and liquid, which are separated -- used as fertiliser.

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If Worldwatch pointed its antenna in the right direction, it would have reported thatthe WSSCC is in imminent danger unless there are interventions by right-mindedpeople in the UN system and outside it. After many years of functioning as anadvocacy group within this system, under the aegis of the WHO but with virtuallytotal autonomy, it is now, perhaps, moving in the direction of being transformed intoa donor agency. This emphasis on 'taps and toilets' is what most governments in

developing countries -- with rich countries being the main donors -- are obsessedwith. But this is not the way to go in making sure that more people obtain water andsanitation.

Particularly as regards sanitation, the WSSCC has put together compelling casestudies from around the developing world that the actual need is to make peopledemand these facilities. At several international meetings on water, Indiangovernment officials have said that India is well on the way to meeting theMillennium Development Goal in this respect. However, merely providing a toiletplinth and fittings is hardly sufficient if there isn't enough water to keep the facilityclean. Activists and experts in South Asia have come up with innovative ways -- asa meeting this March at the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation in Delhi demonstrated -- ofmaking people demand sanitation as a basic right, and to assert their need fordignity and privacy.

As we have seen, this vital goal is tucked away at the back of the book and isimmediately followed by a section on how car-sharing is gathering momentum,which shows how sanitation literally takes a back seat! This is why there is the needto question which agenda Worldwatch has in mind -- or, to put it more bluntly, whichworld it is concerned with.

I heard both Lester Brown and Jonathan Lash, president of another Washingtongreen think-tank, the World Resources Institute, speak at a meeting of internationalenvironmental journalists in Tuscany two years ago. Although most participantswere from developing countries, both speakers spent an inordinate amount of timetalking about hybrid cars -- the Toyota model which runs both on petrol andelectricity. They said that this heralded the way to a new future. But cars, as allenvironmentalists ought to know, are the problem rather than the solution. Even if

they do run on electricity or hydrogen (in future), these will only reduce mobility notimprove it.

The preoccupations of Worldwatch are all too evident in this latestVital Signs. Thepreface deals almost entirely with the US situation, beginning with Hurricane Katrinaand how the US media has finally conceded that climate change is happening. Ifenergy is to be examined on a global scale, it is the shortage of fuelwood to cookfood with -- given the devastating rate of deforestation in developing countries --that should cause alarm, but doesn't figure in this scenario.

Christopher Flavin, president of Worldwatch, states how there is a "tipping point"and "signs are now growing that the world is on the verge of an energy revolution".He mentions the rapid growth of renewable energy industries in this regard, andcites how ethanol production has increased by nearly one-fifth globally, over the last

year. However, there are no quick fixes in such a switchover.

His predecessor, Lester Brown, has, in a study in July, showed how for the firsttime cars are taking precedence over the world's food needs. He writes: " Cars, notpeople, will claim most of the increase in world grain consumption this year. The USDepartment of Agriculture projects that world grain use will grow by 20 milliontonnes in 2006. Of this, 14 million tonnes will be used to produce fuel for cars in theUnited States , leaving only 6 million tonnes to satisfy the world's growing foodneeds ." This obviously disturbing trend ought to find place in a book of this kind.

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Brown goes on to say: "In agricultural terms, the world appetite for automotive fuelis insatiable. The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol willfeed one person for a year. The grain it takes to fill the tank every two weeks, over ayear, will feed 26 people. Investors are jumping on the highly profitable biofuelbandwagon so fast that hardly a day goes by without another ethanol distillery orbio-diesel refinery being announced somewhere in the world. The amount of corn

used in US ethanol distilleries has tripled in five years, jumping from 18 milliontonnes in 2001 to an estimated 55 million tonnes from the 2006 crop."

At the Delhi Summit on Sustainable Development in March, the high-profileCalifornia-based venture capitalist Vinod Khosla made a big pitch for a grass called'miscanthus' to produce automobile fuel in the US, and observed that India coulduse its own species to do the same. However, as should be abundantly clear bynow, developing countries desperately need to produce more food first and thenmore biomass to provide fuel for cooking. Thus, as environmentalists are fond ofsaying: "The earth is one, but worlds are many."

InfoChange News and Features, August 2006