Water—Sin aqua non—Water shortages are a growing problem, but not for the reasons most people think

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13447271

Water

Sin aqua non

Apr 8th 2009 | ISTANBUL
From The Economist print edition

Water shortages are a growing problem, but not for the reasons most people think

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.”

Local water shortages are multiplying. Australia has suffered a decade-long drought. Brazil and South Africa, which depend on hydroelectric power, have suffered repeated brownouts because there is not enough water to drive the turbines properly. So much has been pumped out of the rivers that feed the Aral Sea in Central Asia that it collapsed in the 1980s and has barely begun to recover.

Yet local shortages, caused by individual acts of mismanagement or regional problems, are one thing. A global water crisis, which impinges on supplies of food and other goods, or affects rivers and lakes everywhere, is quite another. Does the world really face a global problem?

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[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. I'm in California, on a well, and the only person on the local aquifer that I know of

I have no lawns, though I do water some trees. I have no water meter either. Somehow I just know that the State is going to try and ration my water too....