By Ayenew Haileselassie

Addis Ababa, ETHIOPIA — North Korea keeps shooting its long range missiles now and then. These missiles do not just reach all important targets; they can also deliver a nuclear message. Its leaders, or rather leader, has effectively made the world believe that he is unpredictable, that one day he could really strike American or South Korean targets.

Japan, Russia and China are all concerned, but not as badly as the other two countries. He has the gun; he seems to have the will to use it. The missing element is the excuse. (Of course, the other side of the argument is that he is already using them and reaping the benefits at least from the immediate south.) Now there are many of us who think that we are too far away or too detached to be concerned about this issue.

But suppose it was not North Korea, but Egypt. Suppose it tried a missile in its vast deserts. Suppose it stood its ground and kept trying them even at a great cost to its international relations. It would of course regain its old stature in the Arab world, Israel would not leave a stone unturned to destroy the country’s missile capabilities, and we in Ethiopia would at last live in constant fear of the consequences of a grave transboundary issue that followed the currents of the river Nile.

It all begins like a love affair. Abay (the Blue Nile) flees its home meets his lover, the White Nile in Khartoum, and the two disappear into the Egyptian Desert. For all the basin countries, except Sudan and Egypt, this trip is not a honeymoon, but an elopement. Everybody loved them, but they chose the desert.

These figures may clarify this point. A study indicated that Sudan has an irrigation potential of 4,434,000 hectares of which it has so far irrigated 3,266,000 hectares, which is 73.7% of the potential. Egypt is utilizing 53.5% of its irrigation potential by irrigating 1,946,000 hectares out of a total 3,637,000.

Ethiopia and Egypt have the same potential, but Ethiopia has achieved a mere 5.2% (190,000 hectares) compared to Egypt’s 53.5%. Tanzania has achieved only 23% (190,000 hectares) of its 828,000 hectares potential, and Uganda, slightly worse than Ethiopia, has achieved only 4.5% (9,000 hectares) of its 202,000 hectares potential.

The reality behind such numbers is that Ethiopia, for example, has never been able to feed itself, despite the fact that a very large majority of its people are kept in the shackles of poverty ever engaged in the losing struggle to grow enough food for themselves and for the market. Had it not been for the perennial drought which has always effectively wiped out years’ of growth and then put the country in recovery mode for more years, Ethiopia could have been a better country economically.

Traditionally Ethiopian agriculture has been low-input, low-output, always dependent on unreliable rainfall, and, even at the best of times, never fed the nation. According to the Famine Early Warning System Network report for June 2009, 7.5 million Ethiopians were indicated as chronically food insecure. “An additional 4.9 million people require emergency food assistance through June 2009. In addition, about 200,000 people have been displaced in the southern parts of the country due to clan conflict and are receiving humanitarian assistance. However, the official size of the food insecure population will most likely increase following poor performance of the belg/gu season this year,” it said.

Ethiopia’s agriculture had, in 1996, delivered a record harvest, following which the government proudly announced that it had finally achieved the long sought after food self-sufficiency. Three years of drought led to an emergency situation in 2000 and a sober assessment of the situation.

It was the following year the Nile Basin Initiative was launched, with its head office in Entebe, Uganda, and seven project offices in seven other places. Since then it has been negotiating. Its purpose was “equitable and reasonable use of the water system” by up and down stream countries “without causing significant harm to down stream countries.” With this initiative Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as other Nile basin countries will work to narrow the gap they have with Sudan and Egypt in exploiting the waters of the Blue and White Nile rivers for their maximum benefit. Ethiopia, for example, wants dams for electricity and irrigation. Such is the issue worldwide wherever there are transboundary rivers.

Asfaw Dingamo, Ethiopia’s water minister, returned recently from a Nile Basin Initiative meeting in Cairo apparently proud that Ethiopia’s interests had not been given away in the negotiations. In an interview with Addis Zemen, the state newspaper, he put the situation in a nutshell saying that Egypt had no rainwater at all, that Sudan was only slightly better than Egypt in that respect, and that the population of the Nile basin was growing very fast.

That was no recipe for war, he said, for studies had indicated that there was enough water for all in the basin. His argument in the negotiations is that extensive developments in the basin area in Ethiopia would avert flooding in Sudan and loss of water due to evaporation in Sudan and Egypt. The water flow would be regulated by the dams in Ethiopia for the best benefit of all three countries. Well, the two countries, who have always wanted to be the solitary users of the water, are negotiating for the next best thing, instead of taking Asfaw Dingamo’s words.

The doomsayers that predict war not just in north eastern Africa but wherever there are transboundary waters have a strong case in their favour.

In the 20th century, only seven minor skirmishes took place between nations over shared water resources, while over 300 treaties were signed during the same period of time to avert similar or worse incidents, according to statistics made available during the World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden, this month. Examine the following related data: · There are 263 transboundary river and lake basins and around 300 transboundary aquifers worldwide.

* Transboundary lake and river basins account for an estimated 60 per cent of global freshwater flow and is home to 40 % of the world’s population.

* Over 75 percent of all countries, 145 in total, have shared river basins within their boundaries. And 33 nations have over 95 percent of their territory within international river basins.

* 158 of the world’s 263 international river basins, plus transboundary aquifer systems, lack any type of cooperative management framework.

The following figures give a hint of the human factor involved in this situation.

* About 1.4 billion people, mostly impoverished, live in river basins where all the blue water is already committed or overcommitted.

* Water withdrawals are predicted to increase by 50 percent by 2025 in developing countries.

* In 2030, 47% of world population will be living in areas of high water stress.

* By 2075, the number of people in regions with chronic water shortage is estimated to be between 3 and 7 billion.

When we bring this closer to home, Egypt recently announced that eight years from now, 2017, the water need of its growing population would surpass what available resources could provide. In 2006 the Nile water provided Egypt 55.5 billion cubic metres of water, out of the total 64 billion it consumed. The 55.5 billion was the figure that Egypt and Sudan negotiated in 1959 without considering other basin countries.

Soon that generous allotment will no longer be enough. Egypt’s consumption is already well below the water poverty line. So how easy will it be to find a negotiated usage agreement? How long will that agreement hold before increasing population demands for more water from dwindling resources?

According to a recent paper by Fasil Amdetsion, an Ethiopian lawyer in America, those parties that believe that there will not be water war either in the Nile Basin or others, give a number of reasons to support their position. They say that communities afflicted by scarcity are likely to alter lifestyles, make a more efficient use of water, and cope with a dearth of resources. There are also who say that there will not be any water war, because there has never been any. [The last one was fought 4,500 years ago.] Amdetsion repudiates these and other arguments claiming that Egypt has always had interest inn destabilizing Ethiopia. He mentions Egypt’s alleged support the Eritrea during the war with Ethiopia and its support to Somalia during the war with Ethiopia in the 1970’s. He believes that Egypt deliberately foiled the peace talks in Addis Ababa among Somali rebels. He believes that Egypt will do all it could to have the upper hand in Nile negotiations.

Meanwhile natural resources worldwide will continue falling. Population continues to boom against natural expectations. Egypt, a desert country that ought to be sparsely populated, has 76 million people living in it, and as Ethiopia, it is gripped by the concerns of providing for a very fast growing population. So doomsayers say that animal instincts will take over to survive, and those instincts will be the war mongering, blood thirsty type.

May be one day, if that war comes, with Sudan serving as a corridor and a fighter supporting Egypt (or Ethiopia???), that may be nature’s way decreasing our populations enough to fit available resources.