Water Wars Hit Rural Zimbabwe

Water Wars Hit Rural Zimbabwe

There is increasing competition for water due to a combination of numerous environmental and political factors, including climate change, poor local planning and lack of adequate financial and material resources to bring running water to poor communities.

In rural Zimbabwe, lack of clean water has become a reality for many communities, in addition to other hardships, such as food shortages, insufficient health services and lack of sanitation.

Poor rains and government’s failure to provide adequate resources to reduce water scarcity -- including skilled water experts, fuel for field technicians to reach remote areas, drilling machines to make boreholes and water purification chemicals -- have worsened water woes.

After president Robert Mugabe embarked on a violent land reform programme, expropriating white-owned commercial farms in 2000, new farm owners have done little to maintain the infrastructure and facilities they inherited when taking over farms, including water systems and irrigation dams.

According to Justice for Agriculture (JAG), a unit set up by the Commercial Farmers of Zimbabwe (CFZ), an organisation that represents the legal interests of dispossessed farmers, wells have dried up throughout the country and no efforts have been made to drill more boreholes to provide water to both humans and livestock.

This is particularly significant since such infrastructure used to provide water for the surrounding communities as well as the farms.

Plumtree

For one rural community, buried deep in the tropical forests between two southern African countries, Zimbabwe and Botswana, the water plight has been particularly harsh when their main water source, a river running between the two countries, almost dried up.

In Plumtree, a poor, drought-prone rural community located about 160 kilometres southwest of Zimbabwe‚s second largest city, Bulawayo, a hostile fight has broken out between neighbouring communities around access to the few remaining water sources.

The Ramakgoebana River has become a major source of conflict for villagers from both sides of the border, Thabiso Mkwena, a 36-year-old man who lives in Tshitshi, near Plumtree, told IPS. "This is a dry area and we have to walk for many kilometres to the fast-drying river. This has led to disputes with villagers from the other side of the river who are accusing us of finishing the water," said Mkwena.

He said residents from the Botswana side of the river have claimed parts of the river as their own, threatening those from the Zimbabwean side with assault if they come to fetch water.

What has heightened tensions even further, Mkwena explained, is that out of desperation, villagers have started to bring their livestock to drink from the river too, as there is no alternative water source for animals.

"The Batswana say we must not bring our livestock here, but we cannot let our cattle die in this heat," Mkwena said.

Letting livestock drink from the same water source as humans has exposed locals to a number of water-borne diseases. Earlier this year, medical staff at the public hospital in Plumtree reported an outbreak of diarrhoea caused by contaminated drinking water.

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Zimbabwe National Water Authority Petitioned to Reverse Takeover

Why is the answer for governments always privitization that has proven to only worsen the problem? Easy: GREED. They don't care if their people die from lack of water or poisoned water as long as they make profit off of it. This is the biggest reason for the growing scope of this crisis: Political upheaval, corruption and greed, which leads to inadequate infrastructure, pollution, and mismanagement, which leads to privitization. And in places where people are too poor to fight back it is a recipe for water wars.

And now that drought has gripped this land water is an even more crucical resource. Governments that do not take proper steps to fairly distribute water to all families as wel; as providing for its clean up in this region should be penalized by fine that comes out of their pockets. Their people drink toxic water with no food living on less than a $1 a day while they live in fancy houses and wear silk suits! Rationing should also be instituted with government giving back control of the water to local entities that have more knowledge of the problem and can better assess the situation. This too is a moral issue, but I fear as in the case of many other areas of the world experiencing drought it only opens the doors to corruption and privitization which in my opinion in some cases is by design to keep control.

In the case of Zimbabwe, people are going for days without supplies after the national water authority has failed successively to raise cash to buy critically needed water treatment chemicals after some water chemical firms refused to supply the chemicals after the Authority failed to clear outstanding debts. ZINWA owed about 1.5 billion to eight chemical supplying companies as of 2006. This is a stark example of how political corruption has affected water after more than seven years of mismanagement and economic collapse caused by the Mugabe regime. Those living there are now experincing water scarcity to the point that they are forced to drink poison and sewerage laden water as they dig deeper to find a source.

This is also a clear example of what happens when you leave solutions strictly in the hands of politicians without the people having a voice.
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From last year:
Zimbabwe's Water Crisis

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Humanitarian Crisis In Zimbabwe

We can help by doing what we can to help organizations like Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Water Partners International, and other NGOS that are respected organizations that bring resources to these regions. However, just throwing money at the problem is not the silver bullet. People need opportunity and a chance to take control of their own lives with the tools they need to make their communities thrive. To be able to have their own water systems to grow their own food and to be free of corrupt governments looking only to sell off their land and their water to multi nationals for profit.

Oil sands will pollute Great Lakes, report warns

Oil Sands will pollute Great Lakes, report warns


Massive refinery expansions for processing crude threaten to wipe out clean-up progress around world's largest body of fresh water

MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT
ENVIRONMENT REPORTER
October 8, 2008

The environmental impacts of Alberta's oil sands will not be restricted to Western Canada, researchers say, but will extend thousands of kilometres away to the Great Lakes, threatening water and air quality around the world's largest body of fresh water.

In a new report, the University of Toronto's Munk Centre says the massive refinery expansions needed to process tar sands crude, and the new pipeline networks for transporting the fuel, amount to a "pollution delivery system" connecting Alberta to the Great Lakes region of Canada and the U.S.

It warns that the refineries will be using the Great Lakes "as a cheap supply" source for their copious water needs and the area's air "as a pollution dump."
The report, which is being released today at a conference at the university, says that as many as 17 major refinery expansions around the lakes are being considered for turning the tar-like Alberta bitumen into gasoline and other petroleum products. While not all will be undertaken, enough of them will be to have a regional environmental impact.

Proposed pipeline and refinery projects around the lakes are expected to lead to total investments of more than $31-billion (U.S.) by 2015, spending similar in scale to expenditures at many oil sands projects. For this reason, the report says the various projects, when taken together, threaten to "wipe out many of the pollution control gains" achieved around the lakes since the 1970s.

The massive expenditures are needed because typical refineries can't process heavy crude derived from tar sands without costly upgrades.

"This expansion promises to bring with it an exponential increase in pollution, discharges into waterways including the Great Lakes, destruction of wetlands, toxic air emissions, acid rain, and huge increases in greenhouse gas emissions," it says.
Most of the projected spending is on the U.S. side of the lakes. Only one major refinery project has been announced for the Canadian side, but that expansion, at a Shell refinery in Sarnia, was put on hold in July because of surging costs.

However, two big Canadian companies, TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. with its Keystone project, and Enbridge Inc., with its Alberta Clipper project, are vying to build pipelines to bring crude from the tar sands to U.S. refineries around the lakes.
The report says the environmental effects in Alberta from tar sands development - from dying ducks caught in tailings ponds to massive carbon dioxide emissions - are well known, but the implications for the Great Lakes "are less well-understood and less extensively explored."

Policy makers around the lakes, in both Canada and the U.S., are largely unaware that the tar sands will lead to massive industrial development in their region, and consequently have no strategy to minimize the environmental impacts, it says.
Some of the harshest criticism is for the Ontario government, which it characterizes as "remarkably unengaged" over how tar sands oil will affect the province and "doesn't seem to even be asking the key questions, let alone contemplating the possible policy answers."

end of excerpt.
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More about the refineries and activism from the Alliance for the Great Lakes:

Alliance for the Great Lakes


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Public outcry and pressure is the only thing that will stop this. This is nothing less than a crime against our Earth and humanity. Humans definitely need an intervention for this addiction. We are destroying the very waterways that we will need to give us sustenence in years to come, especially with a rising population. Climate change is already taking its toll on the water tables of the Great Lakes, and we will now pollute what is left?! This is pure greed and willful ignorance. And the fact that nothing much has changed since my last entry on this Oil Sands Development Not Sustainable is sad.

Join the debate on water commoditization-Economist.com

Join The Debate On Water Commoditization-Economist.com

You can register there and give your opinion in an open debate on water commoditization up to October 10th. Vandana Shiva represents the con side, and someone named Steven Hoffman represents the pro side. This is a good opportunity to let your voice be heard about commoditization of water resources. And of course, it isn't any surprise to see DOW Chemical sponsoring this especially since they wish to buy desalination plants and probably wants to see privitization to hold back resources to spur the building of such plants. There is an all out assault on our resources by corporate America for profit now and we must fight it for our own survival. I firmly believe that now, and this open debate is where you can make your opinions known. I am registered there as 'waterahumanright.' Please participate and give the water justice movement and environmental democracy a hand.

Currently, the voting is: pro 40%/con 60%.

Thanks!

Jordan valley withers in wilderness of Mideast politics

Jordan valley withers in wilderness of Mideast politics

The Ein Gedi spa, built 40 years ago on the shore of the Dead Sea -- the lowest point on Earth -- now offers a tractor shuttle to carry bathers across the kilometre (more than half a mile) of salt flats that separate it from the water's edge. A few kilometres (a couple of miles) up the shore, a campsite that used to rent out cabins by the sea has been sucked underground by the opening of cavernous sinkholes, some more than 30 metres (yards) wide.

The first one burst open in 1998, swallowing a cabin and a cleaning woman. "The earth swallowed her up. She fell nearly 10 metres. They made everyone leave that day and closed the camp down," says Gundi Shahal, an Israeli environmentalist who came to Ein Gedi from Germany in 1979. "Since then it hasn't stopped. The whole campground looks like a moonscape," she says as she walks past the massive holes, one of which contains the rusted shell of a car.

Across the street are rows of dead trees, the remains of a date plantation that was closed because of the danger of the sinkholes. Scientists have documented some 2,500 such holes, with an average of 300 new ones opening up each year. As the Dead Sea shrinks, the level of groundwater drops and as it retreats under the surface it dissolves layers of salt, creating underground caverns that eventually collapse into the sinkholes.

The Dead Sea derives most of its water from the Jordan river, which over the past 50 years has virtually disappeared as a result of massive upstream water projects in Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. For Mohammed Saida, a farmer in the Palestinian village of Al-Auja some 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of Ein Gedi, the Jordan river vanished completely when Israel fenced it off after seizing the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War. The land his family once owned along the river is now in a closed military zone and they have to rely on village wells and a seasonal underground spring. During the winter, the spring spouts up to 2,000 cubic metres (70,000 cubic feet) of water a day but in the summer and early autumn it is reduced to a squalid puddle. "This valley floods every year, but we have no dams so it all goes into the Jordan," Saida says. Israel restricts the building of dams and drilling of wells by Palestinians in the West Bank.

At the foot of the valley sits a water pump freshly painted blue and white like the Israeli flag. Inside an engine pumps water for Israeli settlers and Al-Auja residents. Per capita water consumption in the West Bank stands at 50 litres (around 13 gallons) a day, according to a World Bank report published this month, about two-thirds less than the target recommended by the World Health Organisation. Israel uses around 83 percent of the water originating in the occupied territory, with the rest going to the Palestinians, whose annual water extraction has dropped by around 10 percent in the past decade, according to the same report. "(The Israelis) took the entire river, their share and ours, they took the land, and now they are drilling wells to take our water," says Hussein Saida, Mohammed's cousin and a village councillor. "How can there be peace?"

Shahal and the Saidas belong to Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME), a group of environmentalists from Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank. They have long lobbied for a project to rejuvenate the Jordan valley and the Dead Sea by using desalinated water from the Mediterranean to meet upstream demands. But the idea getting the most attention, and dividing scientists and environmentalists, is the proposed construction of a massive canal between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea.
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It is a human rights abuse to use water as a political weapon. All people have an inherent right to use water for farming and to live. This tactic used by the Israeli government against Palestinians in the West Bank is in my view one of the biggest yet untold reasons why there is no peace in this region. Any peace negotiations that have gone on should have addressed the subject of water and using it as a political weapon to come to a consensus and agreement on sharing this resource amicably. Is it no wonder that terrorism persists in this area with peace agreement after peace agreement falling apart? The lack of water breeds hunger which breeds famine which breeds death and resentment. When are people going to see this? And if they do, to care?

The answer to peace in this region is not war, it is water. And unfortunately, the Dead Sea is now really dead because of politics, hatred, greed, and the policies of those who fail to understand that peace cannot be attained unless common similarities are shared. Water is something all life on Earth requires to live. To deliberately withhold it as a political policy to break any people and hold them in perpetual poverty and servitude is a crime against humanity and the Democracy any country claims to support. I truly hope a consensus can be reached. It may well be the only way to peace. And hopefully without interjection by the World Bank in making stipulations for Palestinians to have their fair share of this water at a higher prorated price.

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