Are we in for water wars?
COMING upon one of those billboards that blight the skyline of the major cities of this blessed land, one learnt to one’s horror that a certain bottled brand had the distinction of being “Pakistan’s favourite water”. This was news indeed, since local lore one had grown up with always had it that any locality’s favourite water was the one that came out of the deep well next to the mosque. Maybe, unbeknown to one, the situation had radically changed after nine/eleven, just as everything else has. But, then, why announce it on billboards?
The one reason that one can think of for this haste to announce it from the housetops (read, billboards) is that our economy whiz kids have all of a sudden realized that there is big money to be made from water. This commodity, that was once not only freely available but was also considered nature’s gift to humankind, has now – thanks to the mixed priorities of our merry band of planners – become a saleable commodity and one out of which millions could be earned without much effort. The only hurdle in the way of the cut-throat brigade aforementioned was the way this precious commodity was available in plenty in this Land of the Pure (read Poor). So, what better way to vault this hurdle than to contaminate our natural sources of water so as to oblige an already impoverished multitude to get addicted to bottled water they could ill afford? What will they think of next? Bottled fresh air, perhaps!
One would crave the indulgence of the gentle reader to digress a bit from the matter at hand. One may be old fashioned, but one can distinctly remember the time when the ultimate thirst quencher was, well, plain water! When one felt thirsty one instinctively went for a refreshing glass of fresh water. And if one felt like living it up a bit when the weather was warm, one opted for the luxury of iced water. That appears now to be history. This is not the done thing any more if you happen to belong to the benighted but bejewelled brigade.
It is considered to be infra-dig to imbibe water if you happen to be thirsty; you are supposed to go for what is euphemistically called ‘a beverage’. For those who still thirst for plain old water, the powers that be happen to have another trick up their sleeve. They have thought up what is now known as ‘designer water’. Public Relations agents have thereby managed to give a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘liquid assets’.
The resultant ‘war of beverages’ has been on for a while. Aerated waters and colas have enjoyed a monopoly of sorts over the beverage market for quite some time now. The investors, it would appear, are further looking at the emerging market of some twenty billion dollars for what are known as ‘alternative beverages’. The mind boggles! If this were the story confined merely to the so-called developed world one would not get overly excited about the affair. But there is more to it than meets the eye.
The irony is that while this game is being played in the prosperous societies – and by association in the prosperous segments of the poorer societies – the overwhelming majority of the world’s population does not have access to clean drinking water. Those (among them the inhabitants of our blessed land) whom nature has endowed with abundant water resources are being deliberately denied access to this natural resource by their ‘planners’ in order to swell the local market for the beverage multinational giants. Meanwhile, children of numerous societies around the world continue to die by the hundreds of thousand every day because they are condemned to drinking contaminated water.
At this point, one could perhaps take the liberty of reminding the multinational beverage giants of their duty towards humanity at large. Profits from the sale of bottled beverages (even if we are to count only the developing world markets) are astronomical. Would it be too much to expect these multinational giants to put aside a small proportion of their profits (say ten percent) to be utilized – under the general supervision of the United Nations – for projects intended for the express purpose of making clean drinking water available to the deprived sections of the world populace? Such projects could help raise the image of the United Nations from an ineffectual debating society to that of a utilitarian Organization working for the general uplift of the ‘peoples’ it is supposed to represent.
Meanwhile, the beverage wars go on unabated. Bottled water and the alternative drinks with their eye-catching names add to the flavour of the contest. The multinational giants continue to rake in billions. The Third World and the common man, as is the norm, remain on the receiving end where they belong! History as we know has seen wars over the control of various natural resources. The most recent have been the wars for the control of oil. It appears highly likely that the wars of the foreseeable future will be on the control of the world’s water resources. In the Middle East and occupied Palestine the struggle for the control of the sources of water is already on. India’s obduracy about Jammu and Kashmir may well be her desire to control the upper reaches of the sources of water flowing into Pakistan.
An authority on ecology once said: “there is no problem faced by a developing country that cannot be traced back to water: either its shortage or its surfeit”. The world has learned the hard way to take water seriously. As always, we are several steps behind. Still, it is never too late to make amends. There are bitter lessons to be learnt from history. The world may be in for “water wars” to follow the ones for the control of fuel oil. As they say, fore-warned is fore-armed.
— The writer is a former Ambassador and former Assistant Secretary General of OIC.
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