Feb
24
Week 2: Water: What’s really going on in Asia?
February 24, 2008 | | 1 Comment
By Elmy Lung
Asia has been making international headlines recently, all for the wrong reasons. In the last couple of months, we have seen the assasination of Benazir Bhutto, drawing concerns to the ongoing political instability in Pakistan. Then there was former Indonesia President Suharto, who died before being brought to justice over extensive corruption during his three-decade long dictatorship. Heavy snow later swept across most of China, stranded production and transportation which caused millions of workers stuck in the Lunar New Year holidays. Newly elected South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was faced with a fraud inquiry that cleared only two days ago.
While it is true that the international attention on the region has definitely increased, the mould in which Asia is depicted in the Western media has changed little. Positive news are hard to come by as a majority is ruled by the familiar underlying theme- that the developing world is backward and struggling. But if this is so, perhaps mainstream media should be reporting more on the serious problem that bubbling in the region: the problem of water scarcity.
This week’s focus is on the water problem in the Asia region. I’m starting off with a brief discussion on the issue not only because it is where I’ve grown up in but also the fact that this is the most populous region in the world. India and China are the only two countries with a population over 1 billion people, meaning approximately one in three of the world’s people are either Indian or Chinese. Projections indicate that population growth will continue to increase, despite facing a large aging population. What’s more, is that combining fast population growth with a hungry desire to industrialize, water use is at unprecedented strain. The future becomes more grim when water is already scarce. The 2006 October’s edition of Journal of Hydrometerology says that unless the way of using water changes over the next 50 years, otherwise the amount of water to support the population will double.
Scholar Carol Thomas estimates that 57% of the people in East Asia & the Pacific and South Asia are without access to improved water. This figure is staggering particularly when this region is widely recognized as the world’s breadbasket and a key manufacturing zone. The truth is, water is overused when developing countries rely heavily on it to sustain vast agriculture industries and further their industrialization processes.
When the “Green Revolution” was advocated and practiced in the 1970s, it introduced new varieties of maize and wheat that could be yield greater production that allowed Asia to a certain degree, sustain itself. But such production methods depend on using large amounts of water.
In the article A Third of the World Population Faces Water Scarcity Today, it highlights that “Agriculture uses up to 70 times more water to produce food than is used in drinking and other domestic purposes… As a rule of thumb, each calorie consumed as food requires about one litre of water to produce.”
In India, around 250 cubic kilometers are used for irrigation annually. This demand for water eats into the underground water reserves. A similar problem strikes China too. About 100 million people are fed on crops grown using underground water that is not being replaced. Water reserves are falling so people turn to diverting water from rivers to irrigate. The Yellow River is already showing signs of drying up. So is the Indus in which 90% of the Pakistani crops are watered from. These countries are reaching “physical limits” of their water supplies. Once again, David Molden (Principal researcher at the International Water Management Insititute in Sri Lanka) emphasized, “We have to learn how to grow more food with less water.” Methods of saving water will be looked at in later weeks. (Stay tuned).
Obviously, there are already measures in place to mobilize water, feeding it to drying lands. India’s Narmada system and China’s Three Gorges Dam are examples- but they require billions of dollars to build and as such, expensive and massive projects that countries cannot implement hastily. Still, the central question remains: What happens when there’s no more water left?
Not only will water scarcity greatly hinder development processes, it will also become a confrontational subject between states. The diverse cultural and competitive economies in Asia will only pose greater risks to hinder cooperative solutions to the problem.
Take Singapore and Malaysia for example. Their relations have long been troubled by decades- long water disputes. The water disputes can be understood as a set of disagreements on water prices between the two countries signed in 1961 and 1962 which supplies Singapore with raw water through the Malaysia state of Johor.
Singapore’s water-conservation policy has been implemented for years that require all toilet- flushing systems to use no more than one gallon of water per flush. Still, it relies heavily on Malaysia for its raw water. At the moment, even though “half of Singapore is being utilized as catchments for rainwater collection” with further plans for expansion but approximately half of its water is still supplied from Malaysia. Conflicts over the price are never-ending. Unsuccessful negotiations have created evermore tension between the neighbors.
Amidst failing negotiations in 1998, Singapore proceeded its plans to construct desalination plans and initated the Water Reclamation Study (otherwise known as “NEWater study”) to recycle water that can be used ”as a source of raw water to supplement Singapore’s water supply”. NEWater currently makes up about 1% of the total daily water consumption. Even if the figure is expected to rise to over 2.5% by 2011, Malaysia is still offended to why Singapore is willing to pay 7.50 Malaysian Ringgit for NEWater over the 6.25 Malaysian Ringgit asking price for raw water.
And that is only for countries that are fortunate to still have plentiful water supplies for their disposal. For many other Asian countries without water and have to result in physical fighting to access is, simply unimaginable. More on that next week on the water issues in the Middle East.
Comments
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)1 Comment so far
At the same time, parts of Asia are also regularly hit by floods- Bangladesh, the Phillipines to name two. India is hit by both floods and water shortages. Are the two phenomena linked in any way?