The Security Implications Of The American Lifestyle

By Michael Shank,
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

The riots across the Muslim world give warning to something much direr than a diplomat's death, however deplorable the Benghazi tragedy. What we say, do, and eat has global implications, and on these three major security frontiers we must do better: Religious, food and climate security. Each of us has a role to play, and each of us is capable of making a difference.

On religious security, when are we going to prioritise co-existence over intentionally blatant expressions of free speech? This is for Europe's Dutch and Danish press and for America's Google and YouTube and the powers that can prevent "a clear and present danger" (the clause that allows companies to pull offensive content in order to avoid crises).

We must do better at respecting, not enabling the denigration of, religion, while preserving rights and liberties. All religions have experienced extensive persecution, some longer than others, some more devastating. Now, thanks to the internet, it is quite easy to offend and then defend the offence by citing freedom of expression. There must be a better way to balance this, and leaders must find a way to legislate responsible parameters lest this continues.

On food security, America's summer drought - which devastated food crops - highlights a trend that will become prevalent. We keep kicking this food security can down the road by reassuring ourselves that we have enough food supply and that it's merely a matter of distribution. The answer is sustainable agriculture: Ensuring that people have an opportunity to pursue it (see Africa's underdeveloped farmland) and that those who have access to agriculture use it sustainably.

To the first point, we have all but forgotten Africa, reneging on donor pledges, letting impoverished countries, like Somalia, get poorer unless they have a terrorism connection. Case in point: Libya. The invasion was all we cared about. We employed excessive force but little focus on post-Gaddafi institutions. We distributed weapons to opposition groups, but did little to develop necessary long-term democratic infrastructure for sustainable governance.

To the second point, the West doesn't do sustainability well. As meat-eaters, our diets are heavily energy- and- environmentally intensive. When a pound of meat consumes 10 to 15 times the water, land and grains that a pound of vegetables/legumes consumes, this is not smart or sustainable. We do not have ample amounts of water, land or grain to sustain meat diets. Resource wars are happening and will become more frequent as resources become scarcer, polluted or privatised.


On climate security, since 2000 we've witnessed the hottest nine years on record (2012 was the hottest ever), an unprecedented Arctic ice melt, and more extreme and erratic weather patterns. We are in radically different times and yet few seem ready to do things radically different. With Americans emitting some of highest carbon per capita, at 20 to 25 tonnes of carbon per year, and the rest - notably China and India - playing catch-up on western-style consumerism, we will have a serious problem on our hands in the next decade.

While China and India's per capita carbon contribution is only at 5 tonnes and 1 tonne, respectively, their populations have the potential to triple the damage that America did. Before adaptation becomes our recourse, producing galactic mirrors that reflect sun rays and cloud-producing machines that cool the planet, we must find ways to do more with less, to conserve and to be cognizant of the security implications of lifestyle choices.

This is not a moral imperative; this is a security situation. All of these are security situations, from religion to food to climate, and it is time we do something about it. Collaborating on the real and lasting security quagmires of this century is exactly how we should be spending our time and energy. We must think at least 50 to 100 years out with everything we do today, because if we don't, there won't be a tomorrow to write or worry about.

Michael Shank is an adjunct professor at George Mason University's School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, on the National Peace Academy's board of directors, and a senior fellow at the French American Global Forum.

Monsanto's Plan To Dominate The World Food System

William Allen writes,


One of its most detested practices is its employment of Pinkerton “seed police” to monitor and investigate farms – organic or not – in the vicinity of other farms that are growing crops from its patented genetically modified (GM) seeds.

Woe to the family farmer who has the misfortune of not preventing pollen that has travelled from GM crops ten or more miles distant from pollinating a single plant in his or her field. Monsanto’s glass-towered legal hyenas will file suit for patent infringement.

According to Food Democracy Now – a non-profit consumer advocate group (I dislike the term “consumer,” but for the sake of familiarity I’ll use it) – Monsanto’s notorious agents investigate (bully) nearly five hundred farms in the US every year. Thus far, nearly two hundred farmers have been hauled into court while several hundred more have settled out of court for undisclosed sums.

While it is regularly the lawsuit plaintiff, Monsanto is no stranger to the defendants’ table, here and abroad. It has endured several major civil and federal lawsuits during the past three decades. Last July a consortium of nearly 300,000 individual farmers, 4,500 organic farms and several seed companies, all at risk of having their products contaminated, brought a pre-emptive lawsuit in an attempt to compel the company to cease its intimidation and litigation practices mentioned above. In February of this year the judge , almost mocking the plaintiffs, dismissed the suit, ruling “these circumstances do not amount to a substantial controversy and there has been no injury traceable to the defendant.” The farmers filed an appeal last week.

Monsanto is also co-defendant in a recent lawsuit brought by a number of small, family owned Argentina tobacco farms. The farmers claim they were forced to use Monsanto’s herbicides and pesticides without the required training and protective equipment, thus causing debilitating health effects to themselves, deformities to many of their newborn children, and serious environmental damage.

One can be certain a corporation this huge, wealthy and powerful has handmaidens in both state and federal government. Monsanto and its corporate biotech bretheren have spent more than half a billion dollars in campaign contributions and lobbying in Washington alone during the past ten years. And it’s paying off. (#Occupy Monsanto proclaims that Congress is now “GMO contaminated.”)

We learned from the Wikileaks memo dump, for example, that the US State Department has acted as a foreign frontman for Monsanto, muscling governments abroad into permitting GM crops to be grown despite widespread objections by those nations’ farmers and environmentalists.

A few months ago the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inexplicably deleted from its website one million signatures and comments from a public petition calling for GMO labeling. (Current and former FDA deputy commisioners - old hands at passing through the well-greased revolving door between industry and its purported regulator – have been Monsanto lawyers. Might that offer us a clue?)

Last month, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (Ind-Vt) introduced to the pending 2012 Agricultural Appropriations Bill (Farm Bill) an amendment that would allow states to pass legislation requiring food and beverages to be labeled as to whether or not they contain genetically engineered ingredients. The amendment was soundly defeated, with twenty eight Democratic senators joining their Republican counterparts despite several recent national polls that reported ninety percent of citizens want their food products labeled for GMO’s.

A new insidious strategy has recently come to light. Apparently, even a corporate colossus like Monsanto, accustomed to swatting away bothersome lawsuits like mosquitos, eventually wearies of swatting. Why not drain the swamp and prevent litigations from harassing us at all! It was revealed last week that the chair of the House Sub-Committee for Agriculture, Jack Kingston (R-RoundUp) attached a rider to the Farm Bill that would allow the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to flip-the-bird at courts and issue permits for cultivation of independently untested GM crops even if a court has issued an injunction against it. (Late last year, Kingston was unironically voted 2011-2012 “Legislator of the Year” by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade association that represents Monsanto, Dow , DuPont and other biotech heavies.)

Food safety and organic farm organizations have gone to Red-Alert. Food Democracy Now states on its website: “This dangerous provision…would strip judges of their constitutional mandate to protect consumer rights and the environment., while opening the floodgates for the planting of new untested genetically engineered crops, endangering farmers, consumers and the environment.”

Take Action: Rep. Pete DeFazio has introduced an amendment that will kill the Kingston rider. The final bill may reach the floor of both houses in just a few days. It is imperative that we flood our congresspersons and senators with demands that they either approve the DeFazio amendment, remove the insidious rider during reconciliation, or failing those, defeat the Farm Bill altogether. (In addition to weakening already feeble GMO regulation, other provisions of the Farm Bill in its present form have led many of the above mentioned groups along with social welfare organizations to call it: “the worst piece of farm and food legislation in decades.”)

According to the Center for Food Safety, nineteen state legislatures considered some kind of GMO food labeling laws during the past year. So far, none have passed. Could that be due to aggressive lobbying or intimidation by the biotech giants? Ask Vermont. In April the legislature began the process of considering a bill that, if passed, would require food manufacturers to label products that are created partially or wholly from GM organisms. In addition, products with GM ingredients could not have the word “natural” and its variants, alone or in any combination with others such as “naturally grown,” on the labels. Monsanto publicly threatened to sue the state if the measure was approved. The bill is currently stalled in committee.

Monsanto and its allies are probably counting on the reality that in the current crappy economy, with state budgets hemorrahging red ink, few lawmakers (regardless of what the public wants) will have the stomach to battle the corporate Goliaths in costly court cases that can be dragged on for years.

Having achieved “Check” for the time being with state governments, the biotech, processed food, and grocery mega-companies have trained their gunsights on us – the voters of California.

Like the Pentagon sending nearly every carrier-led battle fleet into the Persian Gulf bathtub, these corporations are pouring millions of dollars into California to defeat the Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act (Prop. 37), a ballot initiative – similar in language to the proposed Vermont legislation – that will be voted on in November. More than a million voter signatures were gathered on petitions by the California Right to Know Campaign to qualify the initiative for the ballot.

Californians can expect to be bombarded by disinformation speakers, op-eds, and ads “paid for” by phony, industry sponsored “concerned citizens” groups with names akin to “Citizens Against Job Killing Regulations,” etc. Actually, two have now run-up the colors: the Coalition Against Costly Food Labeling, a start-up, industry backed group whose chief talking point is that open labeling will increase food prices and thus be an added burden to already struggling families; and California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, who claim with straight faces that GMO labels will render small businesses and family farmers vulnerable to costly lawsuits.

The hypocrisy of the latter deserves a derisory belly laugh A group co-funded by Monsanto - the company that has sued or threatened to sue several hundred US farmers at the drop of a pollen grain – is warning California’s organic growers and vendors that a law written in part to protect them will expose them to lawsuits.

Both opposition arguments have been thoroughly discredited by reputable scientists, economists and experienced advocacy organizations, on the web and in print publications – easy for readers to find.

The essential issue is that the biotech industry, the food processors who use its products, and anti-GMO groups nationwide recognize the trend setting potential of this upcoming vote. If voters in the most populous state pass this labeling initiative it could galvanize citizens in other states to follow. They also recognize, given a growing public awareness and avoidance of GM foods, that the final outcome of such a trend may be radical: the end of GM poisons in most of the nation’s diet. Battle over.

Will California voters play the role of the no-name gunfighter who confronts and defeats El Diablo Monsanto and his gang in that Spaghetti Western?

Here‘s how Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association put it  (via Mercola.com):

“For decades (Monsanto has) controlled the food supply by buying off politicians and regulatory agencies, intimidating small farmers, manipulating the outcomes of scientific studies, lying to consumers…

Despite Monsanto’s claims to the contrary, scientists are clear: genetically engineered food has been linked to a wide range of health hazards, including kidney and liver damage, infertility, auto-immune disorders, allergies, autism, accelerated aging and even birth defects. We have the right to know if the food we buy has been genetically engineered… It’s time to take back our food, our farms, our power. It’s time to show Monsanto what ordinary people like us can do when we come together.”

Via: "CounterPunch"

The Coming Water Crisis

A paper presented by the World Bank entitled "The Aftermath of Current Situation in the Absence of Work" concluded that Yemen will run out of water in the period between 2020 and 2050. Sana - the capital of Yemen - is likely to be the first capital city to completely run dry in a few years. In parts of Pakistan and India, groundwater levels are falling so rapidly...

By Dr. Habib Siddiqui
June 8, 2011
Courtesy Of "Iviews"

Nearly 71% of our earth is covered with water of which only 2.5% is fresh water, and the remainder 97.5% is salt water. Of this fresh water nearly 70% (or 1.75% of total water) is frozen in the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland. The remainder 0.75% of the total water is perhaps the world's most important resource that is found in lakes, rivers, reservoirs, underground aquifers and other sources. 

Water demand is increasing rapidly worldwide. Of the fresh water consumed by humans, nearly 70%is used to produce food. In Asia, e.g., 86% total water withdrawal is in the agriculture sector. Fresh water is also consumed for household, municipal and industrial uses. As the world population rises, while water consumption per capita increases with urbanization and the rapid development of manufacturing industries, the fresh water supplies are increasingly becoming smaller with contaminated lakes, rivers, groundwater aquifers and reservoirs. 

Large parts of the world are running out of water. A paper presented by the World Bank entitled "The Aftermath of Current Situation in the Absence of Work" concluded that Yemen will run out of water in the period between 2020 and 2050. Sana - the capital of Yemen - is likely to be the first capital city to completely run dry in a few years. In parts of Pakistan and India, groundwater levels are falling so rapidly that from 10% to 20% of agricultural production is under threat. Some 60% of China's 669 cities are already short of water and the current record drought in several of China's region is directly linked to their problems with water scarcity. In northern China, rivers now run dry in their lower reaches for much of the year. The Yellow River, the so-called birthplace of Chinese civilization, is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water.

The division of the river basin water has created friction among the countries of South Asia, and among their states and provinces. The Indus River Basin has been an area of conflict between India and Pakistan for about four decades. Spanning 1,800 miles, the river and its tributaries together make up one of the largest irrigation canals in the world. Dams and canals built in order to provide hydropower and irrigation have dried up stretches of the Indus River. India and Bangladesh have also dispute over the Ganges/Padma and Teesta Rivers water and India is resorting to water theft there as well. Nepal and Bangladesh are also victims of India's water thievery. India had dispute with Bangladesh over Farakka Barrage, with Nepal over Mahakali River and with Pakistan over 1960 Indus Water Treaty. As I have noted elsewhere, the damns and barrages built inside India on many of the common rivers have made navigation inside Bangladesh during the dry seasons almost impossible.

India is busy building dams on all rivers flowing into Pakistan from occupied Kashmir to regain control of water of western rivers in violation of Indus Water Treaty. This is being done to render Pakistan's link-canal system redundant, destroy agriculture of Pakistan which is its mainstay, and turn Pakistan into a desert. India has plans to construct 62 dams/hydro-electric units on the Chenab and Jhelum Rivers, which would render these rivers dry by 2014. Using its clout in Afghanistan, India has succeeded in convincing Karzai regime to build a dam on River Kabul and set up Kama Hydroelectric Project She has offered technical assistance for the proposed project, which will have serious repercussions on the water flow in the Indus River.

China has built some 20 dams on the eight great Tibetan rivers while some 40 more are planned or proposed for construction in coming years. China also admitted that she is building a dam on the Yarlung Zangbo River, which will rise to 3,260 meters, thus making it the highest dam in the world. The river originates in Tibet, but then flows into India and Bangladesh where it is called Brahmaputra and Jamuna, respectively, and is a major water source for millions of people. Recently, the Chinese government has taken on a grand, ambitious and $62 billion expensive project called the South-North Water Diversion Project to divert at least six trillion gallons of water each year hundreds of miles from the other great Chinese river, the Yangtze, to slake the thirst of the north China plain and its 440 million people.


Ethiopia is building three dams, two of them large and one controversial, for environmental reasons. Of these, the Great Millennium Dam, along the Nile River about 25 miles from the Sudan border, will cost nearly $5 billion. The dam will section off a larger portion of the Nile than is used now by Ethiopia, and will have a devastating effect on Egypt. The new Egyptian government has instructed its military to prepare for any eventuality regarding a crucial water dispute with neighboring Ethiopia.

Violent incidents over wells and springs take place periodically in Yemen, and the long-running civil war in Darfur owes partly to the chronic scarcity of water in western Sudan. The Six-day War in the Middle East in 1967 similarly was partly prompted by Jordan's proposal to divert the Jordan River in response to Israel's siphoning off of water from the Sea of Galilee all the way to the Negev Desert. And water remains a divisive issue between Israel and its neighbors to this day. Israel extracts about 65% of the upper Jordan, leaving the occupied West Bank dependent on a brackish trickle and a mountain aquifer, access to which Israel also controls. In 2004 the average Israeli had a daily allowance of 290 liters of domestic water, while the average Palestinian less than 70.

International river basins extend across the borders of 145 countries, and some rivers flow through several countries. The Congo, Niger, Nile, Rhine and Zambezi are each shared among 9 to 11 countries, and 19 countries share the Danube basin. The 1569 mile long Ganges/Padma River is shared by both India and Bangladesh. The longer Brahmaputra River is shared between China, India and Bangladesh. Adding to the complications is the fact that some countries, especially in Africa and south Asia, rely on several rivers, e.g., 22 rise in Guinea. Some 280 aquifers also cross borders. Consider also the fact that many of Bangladesh's 250 rivers originate from the Himalayas and run through India before flushing out to the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean. Bangladeshi scientists estimated that even a 10 to 20% reduction in the water flow to the country could dry out great areas for much of the year.

As global food prices rise and exporters reduce shipments of commodities, countries that rely on imported grain are panicking. Countries like South Korea, China and India have descended on fertile plains across the African continent, acquiring huge tracts of land to produce wheat, rice and corn for consumption back home. These land grabs shrink the food supply in famine-prone African nations and anger local farmers, who see their governments selling their ancestral lands to foreigners. The land grabs to the south also pose a grave threat to Africa's newest democracy, Egypt, in her ability to put bread on the table because all of her grain is either imported or produced with water from the Nile River, which flows north through Ethiopia and Sudan before reaching Egypt.





The Nile Waters Agreement, which Egypt and Sudan signed in 1959, gave Egypt 75% of the river's flow, 25% to Sudan and none to Ethiopia. This situation is changing abruptly as wealthy foreign governments and international agri-businesses snatch up large swaths of arable land along the Upper Nile. While these deals are typically described as land acquisitions, they are also, in effect, water acquisitions.

Just as wars over oil played a major role in 20th-century history, there is growing evidence that many 21st century conflicts will be fought over water. In "Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power and Civilization," journalist Steven Solomon argues that water is surpassing oil as the world's scarcest critical resource.

From Turkey, the southern bastion of NATO, down to South Africa, and from China and Indonesia in the east to Mauritania in the west, most of the countries of Asia and Africa are worrying today about how they will satisfy the needs of their burgeoning industries, or find drinking water for the extra millions born each year, not to mention agriculture, the main cause of depleting water resources in the region. According to Solomon our world is divided into water haves and have-nots. China, Egypt and Pakistan are just a few countries facing critical water issues in the 21st century.

Water is irreplaceable and its use in the past century grew twice as fast as world population. Solomon writes, "We're going to have to find a way to use the existing water resources in a far, far more productive manner than we ever did before, because there's simply not enough." That control and manipulation of water resources should be a pivotal axis of power and human achievement throughout history is hardly surprising. Water has always been man's most indispensable natural resource, and one endowed with special, seemingly magical powers of physical transformation derived from its unique thermodynamic properties and extraordinary roles in earth's geological and biological processes.

Through the centuries, societies have struggled politically, militarily, and economically to control the world's water wealth: to erect cities around it, to transport goods upon it, to harness its latent energy in various forms, to utilize it as a vital input of agriculture and industry, and to extract political advantage from it. Solomon says: "Every era has been shaped by its response to the great water challenge of its time. And so it is unfolding-on an epic scale-today. An impending global crisis of freshwater scarcity is fast emerging as a defining fulcrum of world politics and human civilization. For the first time in history, modern society's unquenchable thirst, industrial technological capabilities, and sheer population growth from 6 to 9 billion is significantly outstripping the sustainable supply of fresh, clean water available from nature using current practices and technologies."

Freshwater is an Achilles' heel of fast-growing giants China and India, which both face imminent tipping points from unsustainable water practices that will determine whether they lose their ability to feed themselves and cause their industrial expansions to prematurely sputter. "The lesson of history is that in the tumultuous adjustment that surely lies ahead, those societies that find the most innovative responses to the crisis are most likely to come out as winners, while the others will fall behind. Civilization will be shaped as well by water's inextricable, deep interdependencies with energy, food, and climate change... By grasping the lessons of water's pivotal role on our destiny, we will be better prepared to cope with the crisis about to engulf us all," writes Solomon.

But has our generation grasped those lessons that are so critical for our survival? Basic human needs for water should be fully acknowledged as a top international priority. Basic ecosystem water needs should be identified and met. Our irrigation systems remain very inefficient, wasting as much as 60% of the total water pumped before it reaches the intended crop. If need be, we also have to alter our food habits into growing crops that require less water. Water conservation through better planning, management, and technologies offers great promise to minimizing water usage in household, agricultural and industrial sectors. As noted by Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute and the author of "World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse," for the sake of peace and future development cooperation, the nations of the Nile River Basin should come together to ban land grabs by foreign governments and agri-business firms. Since there is no precedent for this, international help in negotiating such a ban would likely be necessary to make it a reality. Finally, serious water-related conflicts should be resolved through formal negotiations. 

Sadly, few agreements have been reached about how the water should be shared; most of those agreements are seen as unjust: upstream countries believe that they should control the flow of the rivers, taking what they like, if they can get away with it. Thus, it is not too surprising to hear India's whining about Chinese thievery of Brahmaputra water, while she herself is stealing water from Bangladesh on some other rivers that originate from India.

In his lecture at the Geneva conference on Environment and Quality of Life in June 1994, Adel Darwish said, "International law is not clear on the right of upstream countries to control either surface or ground water." It is also not clear on the shared water courses, rivers or cross border aquifers. That situation, regrettably, has not improved an iota.

The non-clarity of international law remains a matter of grave concern. There are few, if any, precedents that the UN international law commission or the International court of justice could be cited to establish some rules to arbitrate on water sharing; but so far no country has volunteered to do so.

If we want to avoid wars of the future, culminating from water, international laws must be formulated that pledge survival of the lower riparian, downstream countries through equitable share of the common water. Dams and barrages that can alter the vital ecosystem and take away the means of livelihood of the affected people should also be banned on common international rivers. No people should ever have to live with the curse of the dams and barrages like the Farakka (and the proposed Tipaimukh Dam) that kills people!

*****

Dr Habib Siddiqui has authored nine books. His book: "Democracy, Politics and Terrorism - America's Quest for Security in the Age of Insecurity" is available at Amazon.com.

Water: The New Oil

Should Private Companies Control Our Most Precious Natural Resource?

By Jeneen Interlandi
October 08, 2010
Courtesy Of "NewsWeek"

Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Click to view a gallery about how we're losing our lakes.

Losing Our Lakes: Precious Resources at Risk

Sitka, Alaska, is home to one of the world’s most spectacular lakes. Nestled into a U-shaped valley of dense forests and majestic peaks, and fed by snowpack and glaciers, the reservoir, named Blue Lake for its deep blue hues, holds trillions of gallons of water so pure it requires no treatment. The city’s tiny population—fewer than 10,000 people spread across 5,000 square miles—makes this an embarrassment of riches. Every year, as countries around the world struggle to meet the water needs of their citizens, 6.2 billion gallons of Sitka’s reserves go unused. That could soon change. In a few months, if all goes according to plan, 80 million gallons of Blue Lake water will be siphoned into the kind of tankers normally reserved for oil—and shipped to a bulk bottling facility near Mumbai. From there it will be dispersed among several drought-plagued cities throughout the Middle East. The project is the brainchild of two American companies. One, True Alaska Bottling, has purchased the rights to transfer 3 billion gallons of water a year from Sitka’s bountiful reserves. The other, S2C Global, is building the water-processing facility in India. If the companies succeed, they will have brought what Sitka hopes will be a $90 million industry to their city, not to mention a solution to one of the world’s most pressing climate conundrums. They will also have turned life’s most essential molecule into a global commodity.

Related: A Map of the Most Water-Rich and Most Drought-Stricken Nations »

The transfer of water is nothing new. New York City is supplied by a web of tunnels and pipes that stretch 125 miles north into the Catskills Mountains; Southern California gets its water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Colorado River Basin, which are hundreds of miles to the north and west, respectively. The distance between Alaska and India is much farther, to be sure. But it’s not the distance that worries critics. It’s the transfer of so much water from public hands to private ones. “Water has been a public resource under public domain for more than 2,000 years,” says James Olson, an attorney who specializes in water rights. “Ceding it to private entities feels both morally wrong and dangerous.”

Everyone agrees that we are in the midst of a global freshwater crisis. Around the world, rivers, lakes, and aquifers are dwindling faster than Mother Nature can possibly replenish them; industrial and household chemicals are rapidly polluting what’s left. Meanwhile, global population is ticking skyward. Goldman Sachs estimates that global water consumption is doubling every 20 years, and the United Nations expects demand to outstrip supply by more than 30 percent come 2040.

100 Places to Remember Before They Disappear

100 Places To Remember

Proponents of privatization say markets are the best way to solve that problem: only the invisible hand can bring supply and demand into harmony, and only market pricing will drive water use down enough to make a dent in water scarcity. But the benefits of the market come at a price. By definition, a commodity is sold to the highest bidder, not the customer with the most compelling moral claim. As the crisis worsens, companies like True Alaska that own the rights to vast stores of water (and have the capacity to move it in bulk) won’t necessarily weigh the needs of wealthy water-guzzling companies like Coca-Cola or Nestlé against those of water-starved communities in Phoenix or Ghana; privately owned water utilities will charge what the market can bear, and spend as little as they can get away with on maintenance and environmental protection. Other commodities are subject to the same laws, of course. But with energy, or food, customers have options: they can switch from oil to natural gas, or eat more chicken and less beef. There is no substitute for water, not even Coca-Cola. And, of course, those other things don’t just fall from the sky on whoever happens to be lucky enough to be living below. “Markets don’t care about the environment,” says Olson. “And they don’t care about human rights. They care about profit.”

In the developed world—America especially—it’s easy to take water for granted. Turn on any tap, and it comes rushing out, clean and plentiful, even in the arid Southwest, where the Colorado River Basin is struggling through its 11th year of drought; in most cities a month’s supply still costs less than premium cable or a generous cell-phone plan. Many of us have no idea where our water comes from, let alone who owns it. In fact, most of us would probably agree that water is too precious for anybody to own. But the rights to divert water—from a river or lake or underground aquifer—are indeed sellable commodities; so too are the plants and pipes that process that water and deliver it to our taps. And as demand outstrips supply, those commodities are set to appreciate precipitously. According to a 2009 report by the World Bank, private investment in the water industry is set to double in the next five years; the water-supply market alone will increase by 20 percent.

Unlike the villain in James Bond’s Quantum of Solace who hatched a secret plot to monopolize Bolivia’s fresh-water supply, the real water barons cannot be reduced to a simple archetype. They include a diverse array of buyers and sellers—from multinational water giants like Suez and Veolia that together deliver water to some 260 million taps around the world, to wildcatter oil converts like T. Boone Pickens who wants to sell the water under his Texas Panhandle ranch to thirsty cities like Dallas. “The water market has become much more sophisticated in the last two decades,” says Clay Landry, director of WestWater Research, a consulting firm that specializes in water rights. “It’s gone from parochial transactions—back-of-the-truck, handshake--type deals—to a serious market with increasingly serious players.”

Eventually, Olson worries, every last drop will be privately controlled. And when that happens, the world will find itself divided along a new set of boundaries: water haves on one side, water have-nots on the other. The winners (Canada, Alaska, Russia) and losers (India, Syria, Jordan) will be different from those of the oil conflicts of the 20th century, but the bottom line will be much the same: countries that have the means to exploit large reserves will prosper. The rest will be left to fight over ever-shrinking reserves. Some will go to war.

Until recently, water privatization was an almost exclusively Third World issue. In the late 1990s the World Bank infamously required scores of impoverished countries—most notably Bolivia—to privatize their water supplies as a condition of desperately needed economic assistance. The hope was that markets would eliminate corruption and big multinationals would invest the resources needed to bring more water to more people. By 2000, Bolivian citizens had taken to the streets in a string of violent protests. Bechtel—the multinational corporation that had leased their pipes and plants—had more than doubled water rates, leaving tens of thousands of Bolivians who couldn’t pay without any water whatsoever. The company said price hikes were needed to repair and expand the dilapidated infrastructure. Critics insisted they served only to maintain unrealistic profit margins. Either way, the rioters sent the companies packing; by 2001, the public utility had resumed control.

These days, global water barons have set their sights on a more appealing target: countries with dwindling water supplies and aging infrastructure, but better economies than Bolivia’s. “These are the countries that can afford to pay,” says Olson. “They’ve got huge infrastructure needs, shrinking water reserves, and money.”

Nowhere is this truer than China. As the water table under Beijing plummets, wells dug around the city must reach ever-greater depths (nearly two thirds of a mile or more, according to a recent World Bank report) to hit fresh water. That has made water drilling more costly and water contracts more lucrative. Since 2000, when the country opened its municipal services to foreign investment, the number of private water utilities has skyrocketed. But as private companies absorb water systems throughout the country, the cost of water has risen precipitously. “It’s more than most families can afford to pay,” says Ge Yun, an economist with the Xinjiang Conservation Fund. “So as more water goes private, fewer people have access to it.”

In the U.S., federal funds for repairing water infrastructure—most of which was built around the same time that Henry Ford built the first Model T—are sorely lacking. The Obama administration has secured just $6 billion for repairs that the EPA estimates will cost $300 billion. Meanwhile, more than half a million pipes burst every year, according to the American Water Works Association, and more than 6 billion gallons of water are lost to leaky pipes. In response to the funding gap, hundreds of U.S. cities—including Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Santa Fe, N.M.—are now looking to privatize. On its face, the move makes obvious sense: elected officials can use the profits from water sales to balance city budgets, while simultaneously offloading the huge cost of repairing and expanding infrastructure—not to mention the politically unpopular necessity of raising water rates to do so—to companies that promise both jobs and economy-stimulating profits.

Of course, the reality doesn’t always meet that ideal. “Because water infrastructure is too expensive to allow multiple providers, the only real competition occurs during the bidding process,” says Wenonah Hauter, executive director of the nonprofit, antiprivatization group Food and Water Watch. “After that, the private utility has a virtual monopoly. And because 70 to 80 percent of water and sewer assets are underground, municipalities can have a tough time monitoring a contractor’s performance.” According to some reports, private operators often reduce the workforce, neglect water conservation, and shift the cost of environmental violations onto the city. For example, when two Veolia-operated plants spilled millions of gallons of sewage into San Francisco Bay, at least one city was forced to make multimillion-dollar upgrades to the offending sewage plant. (Veolia has defended its record.)

Even as many U.S. cities look toward ceding their water infrastructure to private interests, others are waging expensive legal battles to get out of such contracts. In 2009 Camden, N.J., sued United Water (an American subsidiary of the French giant Suez) for $29 million in unapproved payments, high unaccounted-for water losses, poor maintenance, and service disruptions. In Milwaukee a state audit found that the same company violated its contract by shutting down sewage pumps to save money; the move resulted in billions of gallons of raw sewage spilling into Lake Michigan. And in Gary, Ind., which canceled its contract with United Water after 12 years, critics say privatization more than doubled annual operating costs. “It ends up being a roundabout way to tax people,” Hauter says. “Only it’s worse than a tax because they don’t spend the money maintaining the system.”

Representatives of United Water point out that 95 percent of its contracts are in fact renewed and say that a few bad examples don’t tell the whole story. “We are dealing with facilities that were designed and built at the end of World War II,” says United Water CEO Bertrand Camus. “We have plenty of horror stories on our side, too.” The Gary facility, to take one example, went private only after the EPA forced the public utility to find a more experienced operator to solve a range of problems. “Individual municipalities don’t have the expertise to employ all the new technology to meet the new standards,” Camus says. “We do.”

The bottom line is this: that water is essential to life makes it no less expensive to obtain, purify, and deliver, and does nothing to change the fact that as supplies dwindle and demand grows, that expense will only increase. The World Bank has argued that higher prices are a good thing. Right now, no public utility anywhere prices water based on how scarce it is or how much it costs to deliver, and that, privatization proponents argue, is the root cause of such rampant overuse. If water costs more, they say, we will conserve it better.

The main problem with this argument is what economists call price inelasticity: no matter what water costs, we still need it to survive. So beyond trimming nonessential uses like lawn maintenance, car washing, and swimming pools, consumers really can’t reduce water consumption in proportion to rate increases. “Free-market theory works great for discretionary consumer purchases,” says Hauter. “But water is not like other commodities—it’s not something people can substitute or choose to forgo.” Dozens of studies have found that even with steep rate hikes, consumers tend to reduce water consumption by only a little, and that even in the worst cases, the crunch is disproportionately shouldered by the poor. In the string of droughts that plagued California during the 1980s, for example, doubling the price of water drove household consumption down by a third, but households earning less than $20,000 cut their consumption by half, while households earning more than $100,000 reduced use by only 10 percent.

In fact, critics say, private water companies usually have very little incentive to encourage conservation; after all, when water use falls, revenue declines. In 2005 a second Bolivian riot erupted when another private water company raised rates beyond what average people could afford. The company had dutifully expanded the city’s water system to several poor neighborhoods outside the city. But the villagers there, accustomed to life without taps, were obsessive water conservers and hadn’t used enough water to make the investment profitable.

The biggest winners of a sophisticated water market are likely to be the very few water-rich regions of the global north that can profitably move massive quantities across huge distances. Russian entrepreneurs want to sell Siberian water to China; Canadian and American ones are vying to sell Canadian water to the Southwestern U.S. So far, such bulk transfers have been impeded by the high cost of tanker ships. Now, thanks to the global recession, the tankers’ rates have dropped significantly. If the Sitka plan succeeds, other water-rich cities may soon follow.

But in between the countries that will profit from the freshwater crisis, and those that will buy their way out of it, are the countries that have neither water to sell nor money with which to buy it. In fact, if there’s one thing water has in common with oil, it’s that people will go to war over it. Already, Pakistan has accused India of diverting too much water from rivers running off the Himalayas; India, in turn, is complaining that China’s colossal diversion of rivers and aquifers near the countries’ shared border will deprive it of its fair share; and Jordan and Syria are bickering over access to flows from a dam the two countries built together.

So what do we do? On the one hand, most of the world views water as a basic human right (the U.N. General Assembly voted unanimously to affirm it as such this July). On the other, it’s becoming so expensive to obtain and supply that most governments cannot afford to shoulder the cost alone. By themselves, markets will never be able to balance these competing realities. That means state and federal governments will have to play a stronger role in managing freshwater resources. In the U.S., investing as much money in water infrastructure as the federal government has invested in other public-works projects would not only create jobs but also alleviate some of the financial pressure that has sent so many municipal governments running to private industry. That is not to say that industry doesn’t also have a role to play. With the right incentives, it can develop and supply the technology needed to make water delivery more cost-effective and environmentally sound. Ultimately both public and private entities will have to work together. And soon. Unless we manage our water better now, we will run out. When that happens, no pricing or management scheme in the world will save us.

With Ryan Trac
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