So extra fun for us when this Tom Friedman twice-a-day-broken-clock style item on the coming competition for H2O was datelined Yemen where, per Tom &/or a taxi driver, the war is on:
[P]eople get to run their taps for only 36 hours every 30 days or so. They have to fill up as much as they can and then rely on water trucks that come through neighborhoods and sell water like a precious commodity. I am visiting Mohamed Qaid, a 25-year-old laborer from the nearby village of Qaradh who was struck the night before in the hand and chest by three bullets fired by a sniper from Marzouh, the village next door. The two villages have been fighting over the rapidly dwindling water supply from their shared mountain springs. Six people have been killed and many more wounded in clashes since 2000 that have heated up of late. One was killed a night ago. Qaid is in pain, but he wanted to tell people about what is happening here. I have one question: “Were you really shot in a fight over water?” He winces out his answer: “It wasn’t about politics. It wasn’t about the Muslim Brotherhood. It was about water.”Extra fun because in 1962 our father's employer, a civil engineering firm, sent him to Yemen w/ USAID to advise the locals which direction water flows in or something. He arrived just in time to be kept under house arrest for a wk. or so & then to be thrown out of the country by the anti-royalist army officers who had "attempted to seize power." 51 yrs. later the Yemeni water situation is even worse. No hope, is there?Not much water, either, & what there is isn't cheap.
3 comments:
Oh, yeah. The coming resource wars are going to be a very big deal. Imagine simultaneous water wars and food riots. The net outcome of these sorts of pressures will be the breakup of large poor nations into much smaller entities structured primarily around ethnic or sectarian power structures. India, China, Indonesia and much of northern Africa, along with (perhaps) Eastern Russia will see substantial geo-political turmoil.
Old & Glad of It Editor:
So, who's breaking up now? (All of them?)
And so the species goes out not stewing in its own waste as predicted but killing each other for a suck off a garden hose.
Air being less manageable than water, commodification will require not capturing the source, but making the atmosphere unbreathable for those not paying to live inside a sealed city. Look forward to that, youth!
Mmmmmmm..water
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