Every plant and animal, including humans needs water. In 2002 the United Nations report called Global Environmental Outlook, reported that 1.2 billion people do not have access to clean water and more than twice that number do not have adequate sanitation. In this water-stress world competition between countries for access to water resources is causing friction. This could lead to outright wars unless there are serious attempts to regulate access to water. Only a few countries have taken any steps in this direction even though somewhere in the region of 260 rivers flow through two countries or more.

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is one of the running sores of our time and has soured relationships between Muslim countries and many Western nations. Many people know that access to land and territory is at the heart of that conflict. Seldom, however, do they hear about the ‘water dimension’ of the conflict. In the occupied territories, Jewish communities consume seven times more water per capita, than Palestinians. This is true both of access to the river Jordan water and the Western aquifer. The annual yield of the aquifer is about 362 million cubic metres (MCM). Israelis use 362 MCM which leaves a meagre 22 MCM for the Palestinian population. No wonder Palestinians feel aggrieved. There will not be lasting solution to this conflict until the water is addressed in a fair and equitable way.

The Tigris-Euphrates river valley is another potential hotspot in terms of access to water. In the late 1980's and early 1990's Turkey spent $30 billion building dams and irrigation systems so that they can get maximum value out of the water. This means that countries downstream like Syria and Iraq are affected and have to curtail their water requirements.

Moving further over into Asia there is potential conflict between Pakistan, Afghanistan and India over the River Indus. The Indus and its tributaries rise in the Indian Himalayas. On its journey to the sea it flows through Kashmir and into Pakistan. In 1960 India and Pakistan signed a Water Treaty regulating access to the waters of the Indus. In May 2002 when political and military tension heightened in the region because of the on-going conflict in Kashmir some prominent Indian politicians called for the government to scrap the treaty unless the government of Pakistan stopped helping the guerrillas in Kashmir.

Conflict over water also looms on the opposite side of the subcontinent. In December 2002. The then Indian Prime Minister, Atai Behari Vajpayee, announced plans to pump water from the rivers in the north of the country through a series of canals to supply water to the southern part of the country which is often affected by droughts. There is no doubt but that Bangladesh will resist such a scheme. Bangladeshi politicians point out that the Ganges Treaty, signed between the two countries in 1996, binds India not to interfere with the flow of the Ganges.

The Mekong is also a potential source of friction between Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand.

Given these very real tensions it is understandable that Ismail Serageldin, at the time Vice-President of the World Bank’s Office for Sustainable Development stated that while the wars of the 20th century were about oil and other resources, the wars of the 21st century will be about water, unless drastic conservation measures are put in place.