LESS AND LESS TO DRINK MANY NATIONS FACING A SHORTAGE OF PURE WATER

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32879, 30 March 1972, Page 10

LESS AND LESS TO DRINK MANY NATIONS FACING A SHORTAGE OF PURE WATER

(By

CLAIRE STERLING

reporting to the Financial Times." London, from Rome)

(Reprinted from the Financial Times' 1 by arrangement.)

The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has just issued a report for the coining Stockholm Environment Conference saying that the human race is going to run short of water within a, century. Jaded though we are about such pronouncements, this one still has some zing. Practically every State on earth is starting to worry about water, a recurrent theme in some 75 country reports for this planet-wide Stockholm meeting. Not all of them have a whole century to turn around in either.

Among the planet’s thickly settled regions already afflicted by water shortages are Spain, Italy south of Lombardy, the Dalmatian coast, Greece, the Anatolian Plateau, all Arab States save Syria, most of Iran, Pakistan, western India, Taiwan, Japan. Korea, the western and southern belt of Australia, the north-west and south-west African coasts, the American south-west, Panama, northern Mexico, central Chile and the Peruvian littoral.

Among those heading for trouble by the year 2000 are all of Soviet Russia except Siberia, most of eastern, central and western Europe, the northern part of Britain, Ireland and the United States, nearly all the rest of India, the central Thailand plains, Tasmania, the islands of Java, the rest of the American continent except northern Canada and Alaska, the larger Caribbean islands, the rest of Mexico, and parts of Brazil and Argentina. Demands triple By F.A.O. reckoning, the world-wide shortage will be getting serious in just another 30 years, when the world’s population will have doubled (from 3500 m to 7000 m) and demands for water nearly tripled (from 2,000,000 m to 5,500,000 m cubic metres yearly). The demands in this case mean everything from swimming and fishing in it to making plastics and steel with it, cooling nuclear reactors, irrigating, flushing away residues of pesticides, fertilisers and livestock faeces, carrying off industrial and human waste and, of course, washing, cooking and drinking. Whether because they have not enough water or are fouling, squandering or driving beyond reach too much of what they do have, rich and poor, industrial and agricultural, capitalist and socialist states are pretty much in the same position. A dozen or more African States along a four-thousand mile front are losing precious groundwater irrevocably to the encroaching Sahara year after year, in good part because of over-grazing. Kenya and India, the one underpopulated and the other over-populated, are both preoccupied if for different reasons. The Netherlands, at the receiving end of the dirty Rhine, is about as badly off for drinking water as Rumania and Hungary', depending on the dirtv Danube for four-fifths and nine-

But nowhere is the problem’s universality more stunningly clear than in Soviet Russia’s pre-Stockholm report to the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Europe. More generously endowed with water than most—Lake Baikal alone, in Siberia, is a mile deep and over 20,000 square miles in circumference, and is thought to hold about a fifth of this whole planet’s fresh water reserves—the Soviet Union is a lesson to us all.

tenths of their supplies respectively.

At present, says the Russian report, nearly 25,000 m cubic metres of waste water are dumped into the country’s rivers and reservoirs every year. By 1980 the volume will be two-and-a-half times bigger, and by the year 2000 about fifteen times bigger: 375,000 m cubic metres. Even if all the waste water were to be purified in advance, with a lot better techniques than those available now, it would still have to be diluted with at least six times as much pure water. That is only half of the twelve-fold volume needed for purification now. But it would still use up the whole of Soviet Russia’s river flow. Meanwhile, the actual river flow is declining, while levels of lakes and inland seas are falling: the Caspian has dropped two metres in the part two decades, and the Aral Sea has lost 1,000,000 m cubic metres of water. This is believed to be happening because too much water is taken off the river-system by people and industry; too many hydro-electric dams divert still more; rivers and reservoirs are silting up with flood-borne sediment; and the floods themselves are carrying millions of tons of unrecuperable water off to sea. These floods are largely manmade too, provoked by erosion caused in turn by deforestation: what with the trees the country has cut down for timber and not replaced, and raging forestfires, 45m acres of Soviet forest have been lost in the last quarter of a century. Pollutants remain

Assuming that the Soviet Union can find enough water to purify, enough water to keep itself going 30 years from how, they still could not eliminate the polluting substances entirely. About a fifth of the strongest pollutants would remain with even the costliest cleansing methods,

j their report says; and cleansing techniques so far are Jagging behind the inexorably ■growing volume of polluted ' water.

All in all, the report goes on, this water-polluting process is “the greatest danger for humanity.” There is “widespread expectation of an inevitable exhaustion of rivers, and an awareness of the necessity to substitute new sources of water supply: desalinated sea water as well as melted ice from polar glaciers ... but can this take the place of river waters? And can we . . . allow rivers to become qualitatively exhausted and, in fact, turn them into waste-water collectors?”

The Kremlin’s reply is “No.” Sooner or later, known methods to treat waste water are bound to prove invalid, it says. Distillation and desalination will certainly be in use, but at steep cost. In the end, it concludes, the only answer is simply to stop dumping waste water into rivers and reservoirs. Growth to stop How the Soviet Union or any other country can do that is something nobody has quite faced up to yet. The implication though, is that water problems alone may be enough in the end to force world society to stop growing. More people mean more irrigation to grow more food, producing more run-off laden with DD.T. and nitrogen compounds; more mechanised farming for the same purpose (and a tractor needs more water than a mule); more energy requiring more hydroelectric dams and nuclear cooling; and more manufactured goods relying on more advanced technology requiring still more water (plastics need 10 times as much as steel, and world plastic production is doubling every five or six years now). The question is not just whether the moment may come in our lifetime when we forget what real water tastes like—millions have forgotten already—but whether humans just one generation removed, though surrounded by a chemical substance known as H2O, will be hard put for a drop to drink.