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Canada's Water
Courtesy of Field Agent R. Edgerton | By Unknown (If anyone recognizes the author of this document please ask them to contact us, as we believe in getting permission before syndication. Thank You)
"There is a common assumption that the world's water supply is huge and infinite. This assumption is false. At some time in the near future, water bankruptcy will result."
Maude Barlow, Council of Canadians
With more fresh water than any other place on earth, Canada seems to be in an enviable position as the new millennium approaches and the experts predict that water will be "the oil of the 21st century." The trouble with being in an enviable position, however, is sometimes the wrong people envy you. There are those who cast covetous looks at our ample water, whether for greener fairways on golf courses in Arizona, or parched farms in the American Midwest, or whole areas suffering drastic shortages of drinking water in distant parts of the globe. And there are the "privatizers," those who want to make a buck from water.
Some of the most alarming stories are going largely unreported, certainly by the Western press, the most alarming being the devastation of Yugoslavia brought about by NATO bombing. The most recent attack - April 19, the 26th day of NATO airstrikes - hit a huge chemical plant in Baric, 15 kilometres southwest of Belgrade.
Yugoslav scientists are reacting in horror at the NATO attacks, warning that they are ruining huge aquifiers - underground water sources - that serve areas and populations far beyond the area of conflict. Dr. Momir Komatina, author of 12 books and 260 scientific essays on underground water, says the NATO bombing is destroying not just military targets but the entire ecology of the region. Other scientists say the NATO bombing is creating "a new Chernobyl" in the Balkans.
Dr. Luke Radoja, a Belgrade agronomist, has written, "By burning down enormous quantities of naphtha and its derivatives, more than 100 highly toxic chemical compounds that pollute water, air and soil are released?. Just one litre of spilt naphtha or its derivatives pollutes one million litres of water. These poisons endanger all life forms, not only on the territory of Yugoslavia, but the territories of our neighbouring countries as well as the wider region of Europe because the winds and water-flows are directed right back to Central Europe, the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea region."
Alarming reports from "water-poor" countries have been appearing regularly in wire-service reports around the world. Last month there was a report from Beijing that 20 million Chinese are short of drinking water because of a severe drought affecting Sichuan, Guangxi, Gansu and Guangdong provinces. More than 200 million acres of farmland in China are "parched."
Iran has been hit by the worst water shortage in three decades. The official IRNA news agency reports that Iran is short by 1.2 billion cubic metres of water for farming. The shortage in Iran is expected to worsen starting in June, with severe drought predicted for the summer of 1999.
In Bangladesh this month, hundreds of residents of Dhaka attacked a power supply office, barricaded roads and burned vehicles to protest against a scarcity of running water. The Dhaka Water and Sewage Authority says more than 30 per cent of the city's nine million residents have no access to drinking water. Dhaka normally requires 1.4 billion litres of water a day and is getting only 960 million litres.
Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Environmental Science and Technology reported in March that rainfall in Europe is so full of toxic pesticides that much of it is too dangerous to drink. The problem is that pesticides sprayed on crops evaporate, are absorbed by clouds, then return to earth in rainwater. Concentrations of toxic substances in the rain, especially after heavy storms, now exceed the limit for drinking water set by the European Union and Switzerland. The same problem occurs in North America. In the United States, one billion pounds of weed and bug killers are applied to the land every year, most of which ends up in the country's water systems.
Speaking on Canada's situation, Barlow says wetland loss includes 65 per cent of Atlantic coastal marshes, 70 per cent of Southern Ontario wetlands, 71 per cent of Prairie wetlands, and 80 per cent of the Fraser River Delta in British Columbia. "Over a century of mining, forestry and large-scale industry has affected virtually every body of water in Canada and toxic chemicals are found even in the most remote parts of the Far North," Barlow says.
A report from London says half the people in the developed world, and more in poor countries, carry the stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori, usually caused by slime building up in water pipes. The bacterium causes stomach ulcers and cancer. The threat of Helicobacter pylori is particularly dangerous in unchlorinated water in wells and water supplies in developing countries.
And here we are in Canada with water thundering over Niagara Falls, countless freshwater lakes, rivers and streams, frozen water in the snow, ice and icebergs of the Arctic, oceans of water coursing underground, and one of the largest land masses in the world to catch rain and snow from the sky. Canadians worry more about flood than famine.
"The wars of the future are going to be fought over water," says Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, a citizens' group with 100,000 members. She cites a recent United Nations study that says by 2025 - only 25 years away - two-thirds of the world will be "water-poor."
Is Canada morally obliged to share its water with an increasingly thirsty world?
Can it even be done without upsetting the delicate ecosystems?
And if it can be done, who's going to do it? And who's going to profit by it? When something valuable becomes scarce - and drinkable, usable water is becoming scarcer and scarcer - inevitably the profit-makers find a way to jump into the game. This is what alarms Barlow most of all. The free-traders want water to be regarded as a commodity, something to be bought and sold, perhaps included as an integral part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This makes environmentalists shudder.
In a paper released last month, The Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA) said, "Water is an essential need, a public trust, not a commodity. It belongs to everyone and to no one." CELA argues that bulk exports of water will not help water-poor countries:
"Even large-scale water exports cannot possibly satisfy the social and economic needs of distant societies. "Water shipped halfway around the world will only be affordable to the privileged and will deepen inequities between rich and poor. International trade in bulk water will allow elites to assure the quality of their own drinking water supplies, while permitting them to ignore the pollution of their local waters and the waste of their water management systems."
Commenting specifically on the Great Lakes Basin, shared by Canada and the United States, CELA says: "Changing water levels and flows will have unpredictable and harmful consequences to basin habitat, biodiversity, shorelines, jobs and culture, particularly to First Nations. Lower water levels will mean greater disturbance of highly contaminated sediments in shallow harbours and connecting channels and less dilution of polluted waters."
The CELA paper was deliberately released on March 31, 1999, a year to the day after the province of Ontario issued a permit to a private company to collect Great Lakes water and transport it to Asia. The permit was issued to Nova Group, a company in Sault Ste. Marie, allowing it to ship up to 600 million litres of Lake Superior water to Asia by 2002. After a public outcry on both sides of the border, the permit was withdrawn and the deal never went through. But Barlow, the Council of Canadians and the Canadian Environmental Law Association expect there will be more such attempts in coming years as people seek to turn a profit from water.
Dennis Mills, a Liberal MP, wants Canada to open its water resources to international trade. On its website, Environment Canada predicts that Canada soon will be in the commercial water export business. The National Post has jumped on the export-water bandwagon, calling water "blue gold." The Post's financial columnist, Terry Corcoran, has written: "Canada is a future OPEC of water. Here's a worthwhile long-term bet: by 2010, Canada will be exporting large quantities of fresh water to the U.S., and more by tanker to parched nations all over the globe."
Paul Muldoon, executive director of CELA and a co-author of the report - Maude Barlow had much input into it - says Ontario is lagging in its efforts to manage its water resources. There is a law to block water exports, the 1989 Water Transfer Control Act, but Muldoon says it has never been proclaimed. Another provincial tool, enacted in June 1998, is the Surface Water Transfer Policy. It expressed opposition to water transfers, but carries no legal weight, Muldoon says. The latest provincial regulation aimed at managing Ontario's water supply is the Ontario Water Resources Act, which was proposed in December 1998. Its purpose was to give legal weight to the Surface Water Transfer Policy, but it has not been approved by the Ontario Cabinet.
Muldoon says protecting Ontario's water is more urgent than ever because of growing world demand for water, and because entrepreneurs increasingly are looking for ways to export and sell) large amounts of Canadian water. They are also looking for precedents, anything that could be used to have water designated as a "commodity" that can be bought, sold and exported.
Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy is on the record as saying water is "not just a commodity." He said this in March 1999 when he announced an export moratorium) that will remain in place until all the provinces can agree on a method to ban water exports permanently. The provinces share jurisdiction with the federal government over lakes and rivers in Canada.
There may already be a precedent, however, as it is legal to export bottled water, which is not considered a "bulk" export. McCurdy Enterprises of Newfoundland wants to "harvest" 13 billion gallons of water a year from Gisborne Lake, an 11-square-mile lake in Newfoundland. The plan is to take water from the lake by pipeline five miles to the coastal town of Grand LaPierre, where it would be loaded into scrubbed, single-hull former oil tankers. McCurdy Enterprises also plans to open a water-bottling plant in Grand LaPierre that would employ 150 people. The local municipality approved the plan, as did the province, but it is on hold because of the moratorium announced by the federal government.
Another Canadian company, Global Water Corporation, has a bulk-water purchase agreement with the Alaskan community of Sitka, which would allow the company to take five billion gallons of water a year from the glacier-fed Blue Lake for export to China. The bottled water would be contained in five-gallon jugs.
Other water export schemes have been cooked up over the years. In the late 1950s, American engineers prepared a plan to dam part of James Bay to divert water to the American Midwest. In the 1960s, there was a similar plan to take water from the Yukon and Mackenzie Rivers in Canada's North and divert it to the American West. In 1991, British Columbia gave six Canadian companies licences to export bulk shipments of water. One of the companies formed a joint venture with an American firm to ship Canadian water to Goleta, California, which was experiencing a severe drought. British Columbia later withdrew from the scheme, abiding by the federal government's moratorium.
In February 1999, The New York Times carried a story on Canada's position in a water-rich, water-poor world. It began:
"For just about as long as there has been a border with the United States, some Canadians have believed that Americans covet their country and the resources it contains.
"A few conspiracy subscribers still believe Washington harbors ambitions about northern expansion similar to those that provoked the first armed incursion into what is now Canada in the 18th century. And a certain type of Canadian is sure that free-trade agreements are a plot to make Canada a commercial colony of the United States.
"But there is one subject that leaves a broad range of even normally clear-eyed and level-headed Canadians looking for American subterfuge - fresh water.
"From the thunderous torrent at Niagara Falls to the perpetual rainy coast of British Columbia, Canada is awash in more fresh water than almost any other place on earth. But although it contains 20 per cent of the world's known freshwater resources, Canada believes it has little or none to spare."
The Times article quotes Barlow of the Council of Canadians as saying, "I don't think the United States is going to send up an army to take our water. I don't think they have to." What Barlow means is that under the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canadian bulk water may already be subject to continental exploitation, and unless Canada acts firmly and forcefully it almost certainly will be. Canadian bottled water already is included in NAFTA. The difference between a litre of bottled water and a supertanker of bulk water may turn out to be merely a matter of size and semantics.
Muldoon of the Canadian Environmental Law Association expects the first serious pressure on Canada's water resources to come from the U.S. Southwest where development is rapidly outgrowing the region's water supply. He also expects pressure from the American plains, where intensive agriculture is depleting aquifiers, the scientific term for what we know as underground water supplies. Muldoon fears that even a modest water export precedent "could open the floodgates, changing Canada's water supply position for the worse - and forever."
An irony here, Maude Barlow points out, is that even an attempt to ban water exports would acknowledge that fresh water in lakes and rivers is a commodity subject to trade-agreement regulations. Her mission now is to emphasize Canada's sovereign rights, its right to control its own resources.
In this she would have an ally in Col. Pierre LeBlanc, commander of Canadian Forces in the North. Col. LeBlanc chose the creation of the new territory of Nunavut as an opportune time to warn Canadians their sovereignty will be affected if global warming results in an open Northwest Passage, which he expects to happen in 10 to 15 years. A navigable Northwest Passage would cut shipping time in half between Europe and the Pacific because ships now must use the Panama Canal.
"In the old days there was very little activity in the North, especially when it was all frozen up," he told CBC News in Iqaluit in March. "But now that it appears it's thawing, and with the end of the Cold War, there's a lot more activity, so maybe we require more active surveillance of the North." With the diminishing supply of fresh water in the world, Col. LeBlanc says it is only a matter of time until foreign ships sail into the Canadian Arctic and take on fresh water without detection.
Meanwhile, the Council of Canadians keeps churning out warnings, which are worth reading and heeding. Such as:
- The consumption of water is doubling every 20 years, twice the rate of world population growth;
- The underground aquifier that supplies one-third of the water for the continental United States is being depleted eight times faster than it is being replenished;
- Saudi Arabia is a net exporter of wheat using non-renewable water reserves. Saudi Arabia is expected to exhaust its water reserves in 50 years;
- The manufacture of computer wafers, used in the production of computer chips, uses up to 18 million litres of water a day. Around the world, the computer industry uses 1.5 trillion litres of water and produces 300 billion litres of wastewater every year.
Barlow expects the first severe impact of the coming water bankruptcy will hit China, where annual industrial water use is expected to rise from 52 billion tons to 269 billion tons in the next 30 years, due to a huge population increase and rising incomes that mean more indoor plumbing. "China will be the first country in the world that will literally have to restructure its economy to respond to water scarcity," Barlow says.
We will be hearing much more about water in coming months and years. And if wars of the future will be fought over water, Canada will be in the thick of the battle.
We at Uhuru thought this information would be interesting to those that have either already to begun to prepare for this, and for those that haven’t heads up.
Uhuru and Peace
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