False Economy - Alan Beattie [47]
The control of water, principally through dams, was one of the great symbols of progress and nationhood of the twentieth century. It is not hard to see why. In a century of rising and increasingly urbanized populations being supported by a smaller number of farmers, the ability to control the water supply became more important.
Dams also provide power, another essential input to the modern economy. The Hoover Dam in Nevada and the series of hydroelectric and irrigation projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority were among the most potent and enduring symbols of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the program of public works and government intervention designed to combat the Great Depression and modernize America. The Aswan Dam, built between 1959 and 1970, was the pride of modern Egyptian nationalism under Gamal Abdel Nasser. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of an independent India, said that dams were the temples of his modern country. The great dams of the twentieth century held back floods, powered cities, and made deserts bloom.
There is, in fact, no generalized water shortage in the world: the planet has enough to feed and wash its inhabitants. Nor is there likely to be one as long as the global population, following current projections, stabilizes below 10 billion and water-saving technologies continue to be developed in farming and industrial production. But localized water shortages do exist, thanks to a hefty degree of misallocation. Much water is given away free, while, as when parceling out any scarce resource, it should instead be given a price. As a United Nations report noted a couple of years ago, there is a shortage of water in the world in the same way that there would be a shortage of Porsches if they were priced at $3,000 each. Sell something too cheap, and too much of it will be used.
One of the reasons for the persistent underpricing is the clear tradeoff between the conservation of water and other aims frequently regarded as desirable, notably the elusive concept of "food security." Like the "energy security" that is so exercising politicians today, especially in the United States, food security is frequently confused with food self-sufficiency. The former means ensuring there will always be enough to eat; the latter means growing it yourself.
Self-sufficiency protects a country from certain risks, such as a disruption of trade through war, economic blockade, blackmail, or other unusual events. But it makes the nation's food supply dependent on the reliability of the domestic economy's own farming. As the Irish discovered during the nineteenth-century famines, when the potato harvest failed, that can be dangerous.
These questions of food security are particularly acute in the Middle East and North Africa—Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco—because of the shortage and variability of water and the size and rapid growth of populations. Managing water supply is critical to life. A map of the region shows an almost perfect fit between annual rainfall and population density, with people crowded along the relatively rainy coasts of Morocco and Tunisia. The exceptions are the even more heavily peopled Nile and Euphrates valleys, where the water arrives horizontally rather than vertically, and in larger amounts.
Humans use water mainly for agriculture. Each individual needs about a cubic meter of water per year to drink, and somewhere between fifty and a hundred cubic meters for washing and so forth. But the overall "water footprint"—the total water used to support each individual and, by extension, each country—mainly reflects food production. The food each individual consumes takes at least a thousand cubic meters of water to produce or, in the terminology we introduced before, has a thousand cubic meters of water embedded in it.