When you got your monthly household bills, which is the most inexpensive, insignificant one of the lot? If you hail from a typical Malaysian household, it would have to be your water bill. So would you believe that Asia- and that include Malaysia is in the grip of a water crisis? Most likely you are going,"What crisis?"
BUSINESS AS USUAL
When we have an oil crisis, prices at the petrol pump immediately go up and instantaneously impact our pockets. Then there follows the knock on effects of all the goods shipped using fuel, whose prices immediately head north in tandem with the petrol increase. And wham, our pockets keep taking one hit after another. But with our water crisis, it's business as usual. Yet at a recent water and urban planning conference, Arjun Thapan, special adviser to the Asian Development Bank pointed out that at the rate Asia is going, it would have a 40% gap between water demand and supply by 2030. Given that 80% of Asia's water is used to irrigate agricultural lands, the shortage could have serious implications for future food supplies. Already water shortages are constraining food production growth. Rice cultivation is being phased out around Beijing because it is such a thirsty crop and places like Egypt are restricting rice production in favour of wheat-and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
CHILLING LINKS
And these facts tally with a recent book, "Plan B 4.0; Mobilizing to Save Civilization," penned by Lester R. Brown of the Earth Policy Institute that documents the chilling global links between water management, population growth and food security, chilling because we are in fact, according to these two eminent gentlemen above-and a great body of anecdotal research supports their views-reaching tipping point in addressing these issues. A World Bank study of India's water balance notes that 15% of its grain harvest is produced by over pumping, in human terms, that's 175 million Indian being fed with grain produced from wells that will be going dry. The comparable number for China is 130 million. Among other countries facing harvest reductions from groundwater depletion are Pakistan, Iran and Yemen
"The tripling of world wheat, rice and corn prices between mid-2006 and mid-2008 signalled our growing vulnerability to food shortages'" says Brown, "It took the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression to lower grain prices. Past decades have witnessed world grain price surges, but they were event-driven-a drought in the former Soviet Union, a monsoon failure in India or a crop withering heat wave in the US Corn Belt. This most recent price surge was trend-driven, the result of our failure to reverse environmental trends that are undermining world food production." And a major factor precipitating this crisis is the falling water tables across the globe.
CHANGING OUR MINDSET
But we continue to consume water ineffectively. This is often the result of low water prices. In many countries, subsidies lead to irrationally low water prices, creating the impression that water is abundant when in fact it is scarce. As water becomes scarce, it needs to be priced accordingly.
Thapan categorically states, "Water cannot any longer be seen as a free and never ending natural resource," He pushes for a more realistic pricing of water as one key driver in conserving and using it wisely. Singapore and Israel have been held up as role models in doing just that. In the case of Malaysia, the volume of used water that remain untreated-leading to massive pollution of our river-is a major worry.
We are in race against time and Brown avers,"It is decision time. We have to make a choice. We can stay with business as usual and watch our economy decline and our civilization unravel, or we can adopt Plan B."
But is anyone out there
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