Water shortages the growing problem
THE overthrow of Madagascar’s president in mid-March was partly caused by water problems—in South Korea. Worried by the difficulties of increasing food supplies in its water-stressed homeland, Daewoo, a South Korean conglomerate, signed a deal to lease no less than half Madagascar’s arable land to grow grain for South Koreans. Widespread anger at the terms of the deal (the island’s people would have received practically nothing) contributed to the president’s unpopularity. One of the new leader’s first acts was to scrap the agreement.
Three weeks before that, on the other side of the world, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California declared a state of emergency. Not for the first time, he threatened water rationing in the state. “It is clear,” says a recent report by the United Nations World Water Assessment Programme, “that urgent action is needed if we are to avoid a global water crisis.”
Thus begins a most interesting article in The Economist on how water is used. We tend to take for granted in NZ that we have surplus water, but it may well be that in some respects we do not. In addition are we effcient or wasteful users of water. Are we over burdening our water resource by increasing dairying when other uses might be better, for example less water intensive sheep farming.
The article is well worth reading and thinking about.
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Reza’s same comment was left on an unrelated post on my blog. It is spam in Arabic linking to an Iranian tech site. It is repeated across the web. I am submitting it to Akismet as spam and maybe it will be pulled automatically from all WordPress blogs.
I’ve noticed that environmentalists like a price put on water from the skies, in the mountains and on the farms, but they grow increasingly nervous when the pricing enters the suburbs. Then it becomes the dreaded “privatisation”.. and when it reaches their homes it becomes “fascism”.
I’m sure I’ll figure out why.. some day.
JC
can anyone translate Reza’s comment?
One of the topics the article touches on is precisely that:-
To make water use more efficient, says Koichiro Matsuura, the head of UNESCO, the main UN agency dealing with water, will require fundamental changes of behaviour. That means changing incentives, improving information flows, and improving the way water use is governed. All that will be hard.
Water is rarely priced in ways that reflect supply and demand. Usually, water pricing simply means that city dwellers pay for the cost of the pipes that transport it and the sewerage plants that clean it.
شرکت مهندسی حارس هوشمند با فعالیت در زمینه امنیت اطلاعات و ارتباطات و همچنین حفاظت الکترونیک بازوی کمکی حراست ها و تولید کننده نرم افزار کنترل مراجعین می باشد.
“Not for the first time, he threatened water rationing in the state.”
Rationing? Why not just price the water, give it a market value and supply will equal demand.