REVIEW:
Water Wars By Constantine Markides |
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June 9, 2004: In her preface to Water Wars, Vandana Shiva describes traveling in India from Delhi to Jaipur for a conference on drought. On the train, she was served a bottle Aquafina water, a brand owned by Pepsi. Shiva contrasts this exchange of water with what took place on the streets of Jaipur at the peak of the drought. Thatched huts were constructed and became places where people could receive free water in earthen pots. This “clash between two cultures,” as Shiva calls it, is a fitting opening for Water Wars. Vandana Shiva writes that “[t]he water crisis is the most pervasive, most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth” (1). In this brief book, Shiva lucidly details the severity of the global water shortage. A physicist turned activist, Shiva combines a scientist’s analytical rigor with an activist’s commitment to economic and social change. Thorough in her research, Shiva gives straightforward reasons for the global spread of water scarcity and water famine: clear-cutting reduces the earth’s capacity to retain water in the tree canopies and leafy forest floors; tube wells and energized pumps for sugar cane irrigation withdraw more water than can be replenished and exhaust the shallower basins that hand-drawn peasant wells depend on; mining operations gouge out wounds in the natural protective casings of underground reservoirs; high-profit, water-intensive crops replace the drought-resistant ones that had been selected and bred over centuries to suit local habitats. For Shiva the roots of the crisis stem from a conflict over two separate value systems. One sees water as a communal resource that should be freely available and diligently conserved; the other sees water as a market good to be possessed, bought and sold. The market proponents argue that the water crisis can be alleviated by privatizing water: places with more water can sell to places with less water and the higher prices will lead to conservation. The subtitle of the book, Privatization, Pollution and Profit, should make it clear where Shiva stands. She offers Bolivia as a stark example of how privatization can affect a community. In 1999, on the recommendation of the World Bank, the water systems in Cochabamba, Bolivia, were privatized. Government subsidies were lifted and International Water, a subsidiary of Bechtel, took over. At a time when the minimum wage in the city was less than $100/month, water bills shot up to $20/month. Massive public protests began and continued despite media censorship and killings of protestors. Bolivia proved to be an exemplar of privatization resistance: the dedicated outcry eventually led to the restoration of the public water system. Shiva does not soften her analysis by suggesting that privatization catastrophes are well-meaning failures. She does not sympathize with the efforts of corporations to profit at all costs: vying to win lucrative contracts to build dams in India that displace riparian communities, destroying mangroves to make way from shrimping ponds, planting paper and pulp eucalyptus monocultures that suck regions dry. As one would expect from the author of Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, Shiva does not gloss over the relationship between food and water. In Chapter 5, Shiva discusses how industrial food production and water waste go hand in hand. As chemical fertilizers replace organic fertilizers, soil loses its capacity to retain water. As new varieties of wheat and rice replace indigenous varieties and ‘inefficient’ crops like millet, water-usage rises dramatically. Reservoirs are depleted and rivers are diverted, resulting in water logging and salinization. The Aral Sea is six times saltier than it was several decades ago because the rivers feeding into it have been diverted to water-intensive crops. The fish catch in the Aral was once 25 million tons a year. Now it is zero. “No Blood for Oil” is a familiar enough protest slogan; “No Blood for Water” may soon gain popularity. Shiva describes how many conflicts are in fact water wars masked as ethnic or religious conflicts. From the banks of India’s Narmada and Ganges to the Kurdish region of southeast Turkey to Owens Valley, California, many clashes around the world are fundamentally about water. Shiva cites the West Bank as an example of water apartheid: Israel consumes about 80 percent of the West Bank’s water while Palestinians consume about 20 percent. If you control water, you control life. Water Wars covers an impressive amount of territory for so slim a volume. One chapter is dedicated to theories on water rights, another to climate change, another to dams and control of rivers, another to the role of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Always, Shiva refers back to communities in her homeland, India, pointing to their water conservation practices, their culture of giving and exchange, and their reverence for both water and soil. Towards the end of Water Wars, Shiva recounts a Hindu
myth that helps explains why the Ganges is sacred to Hindus. According
to the myth, the Ganges originated in heaven and descended to earth
to transport the ashes of King Sagar’s 60,000 sons to heaven.
The Ganges is thus considered a conduit between earth and heaven,
a purifying agent (curiously, scientists have found that cholera
germs entering the Ganges waters die within three to five hours—although
they can't yet explain why). The appendix lists 108 sacred names
for the Ganges—graceful names like Lila-lamghita-parvata (Leaping
over mountains in sport) and Khandendu-drta-sekhara (Having the
crescent moon as a crest). After such a potent and dynamic analysis,
the array of names is a refreshingly subtle suggestion that there
is much more to water than charts and profit reports can convey.
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