“I’m an optimist,” said Peter McCornick, director for water policy at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute, about the future of food and water security in the Ganges and Mekong river basins at the World Wildlife Fund’s recent two-day symposium on water and climate change (video). Although the basins are under threat not only from climate change, but also urbanization, industrialization, development, and population growth, he maintained there are solutions, “as long as we understand what is going on.”

“Water shortages,” warns South Asia scholar Anatol Lieven, “present the greatest future threat to the viability of Pakistan as a state and a society.

This warning may be overstated, but Pakistan’s water situation is deeply troubling, as described in a new report from the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program, Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis.

Water availability has plummeted from about 5,000 m3 per capita in the early 1950s to less than 1,500 m3 per capita today. As Simi Kamal reports in the first chapter of Running on Empty, Pakistan is expected to become “water-scarce” (below 1,000 m3 per capita) by 2035—though some experts project this could happen in 2020, if not earlier.

In an unstable nation like Pakistan, water shortages can easily become security threats. In April 2009, alarm bells sounded when the Taliban pushed southeast of Swat into the Buner district of the Northwest Frontier Province. Not only is Buner close to Islamabad, it lies just 60 kilometers from the prized Tarbela Dam, which provides Pakistan with billions of cubic meters of precious water for irrigation each year.

Soaked, Salty, Dirty, and Dry

According to Kamal, Pakistan faces significant and widespread water challenges:

• Inefficient irrigation.
• Abysmal urban sanitation.
• Catastrophic environmental degradation.
• Lack of water laws to define water rights.
• Lack of a sound policy on large dams.

An arid country dependent on agriculture, Pakistan allocates more than 90 percent of its water resources to irrigation and other agricultural needs. Unfortunately, intensive irrigation and poor drainage practices have waterlogged and salinized the soil.

Women and Water in Rural Pakistan

Rural women and small farmers are particularly affected by Pakistan’s water crisis. Women bear the primary responsibility for obtaining water, but have been traditionally been shut out of government water-planning and decision-making processes. However, government and media initiatives, described by Sarah Halvorson in Running on Empty’s chapter on water and gender, are increasingly highlighting the importance of women’s participation.

Meanwhile, Adrien Couton reports that Islamabad’s water projects mainly benefit large and wealthy farmers—even though Pakistan has approximately four million farms smaller than two hectares.

Pakistan’s Thirsty Cities

With most of Pakistan’s water dedicated to agriculture, less than 10 percent is left for drinking water and sanitation. A quarter of Pakistanis lack access to safe drinking water—and many of them reside in the country’s teeming cities.

Worse, the drinking water that does exist is quickly disappearing. Lahore, which relies on groundwater, faces water table declines of up to 65 feet, as described by Anita Chaudhry and Rabia M. Chaudhry in their chapter on the city.

The scarcity of clean water in the cities—exacerbated by a lack of wastewater treatment—is a leading cause of deadly epidemics. At least 30,000 Karachiites (of whom 20,000 are children) perish each year from unsafe water.

Pakistan Must Act Now To Solve the Water Crisis

Pakistan arguably has the technological and financial resources to provide clean water. So what’s the hold-up? In her chapter on public health, Samia Altaf argues that the problem is the absence of a strong political lobby to advocate for water—and that no one holds Islamabad accountable for fixing the problem.

The report offers more recommendations for addressing Pakistan’s water:

• Invest in existing infrastructure and in modest, indigenous technology.
• Strike appropriate balances between centralized and decentralized management.
• Devote more attention to water allocation and distribution on local/individual levels.
• Understand the links between agricultural and urban water pressures.
• Embrace the role of the private sector.
• Conserve by favoring water-saving technology; less water-intensive crops; and water-conserving urban building design.
• Address structural obstacles like systemic inequality and gender discrimination.
• Take immediate action. Tremendous population growth and rapidly melting glaciers in the Himalayas ensure that the crisis will deepen before it eases.

The need for immediate action cannot be overstated. While Pakistan’s water crisis may not threaten its viability, it is undeniable that so long as the crisis rages on, essential components of the nation—such as the vital agricultural economy, the health of the population, and political and economic stability—lie very much in the balance.

Michael Kugelman is the Wilson Center’s South Asia specialist. He is co-editor, with Robert M. Hathaway, of the recently published Wilson Center book Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis, on which this post is based. Much of his work has focused on resource shortages in Pakistan and India.

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Written by Michael Kugelman and originally published in Dawn.

Last May, while Pakistan’s military was waging its offensive in Swat, Islamabad officials were simultaneously launching another offensive in the Gulf: a charm offensive to secure investment in Pakistani farmland.

Appearing at “farmland road shows” across the region, the investment ministry representatives depicted Pakistan’s soil as the perfect solution to the Gulf nations’ food insecurity.

Such efforts have paid off for Islamabad (and according to media reports, more shows have been staged in recent days). Pakistan’s farmland is an increasingly popular target for wealthy, food-importing nations who, because of the volatility of world food markets, are taking food security matters into their own hands. These states (and also private investors) aim to buy or lease farmland overseas, grow their own crops and export them back home.

Given their lack of transparency, the details surrounding these investments are sketchy and the facts elusive. In Pakistan, uncertainty reigns over the exact amount of land made available to investors, the quantum of land sold or leased so far, and who is in fact doing the investing.

Still, even without these details, there is strong evidence to suggest that the race for Pakistan’s farmland — if not halted prematurely by farmers’ opposition or investor change-of-hearts — could trigger droves of land deals, acute resource shortages and even political strife.

Islamabad has established an extraordinarily welcoming investment environment that financiers will find hard to resist. The government’s Corporate Agriculture Farming (CAF) policy — spelled out on the Board of Investment’s website — effectively legalizes foreign land acquisitions. It permits state land to be purchased outright or leased for 50 years, and allows investors to determine the size of their acquisitions (with no upper ceiling). These features apply to a broad range of agriculture from crops, fruits and vegetables to forestry and livestock farming.

Land investors flock to countries with strong legal protections. Cambodia’s government has reportedly established a national land concession authorizing public land to be allocated to foreigners — and the country is now experiencing what the BBC describes as an “epidemic of land-grabbing.” Conversely, in India, foreign companies are banned from owning farmland — and considerably fewer investors have come calling.

Pakistan, like Cambodia, provides the legal cover farmland investors look for. However, the CAF goes beyond legal protections. It also offers generous financial incentives such as 100 per cent foreign equity; exemptions on land transfer duties; and customs-duty-free, sales-tax-free agricultural machinery imports.

Legal protection and financial incentives — what more could a foreign land investor in Pakistan want? Security, of course, and Islamabad purports to have this covered as well, through the formation of a 100,000-strong security unit. Pakistan’s government is so serious about concluding land deals that it has offered to deploy a force almost a fifth the size of the army to protect investors’ new holdings.

A rash of foreign land acquisitions in Pakistan would deepen the country’s resource crisis. Pakistan already suffers widespread water shortages, and could be water-scarce by 2020. However, supplies could dry up much sooner if enormous quantities of water are siphoned off to support large-scale, water-intensive agricultural production schemes.

To understand the scale of Pakistan’s water shortages, take a look at Aquastat, the FAO’s water statistics database. Of all the nations most often associated with relinquishing farmland, only one — Kenya — has less water availability per capita than Pakistan’s 1400 cubic meters. In fact, of the nearly 200 countries listed in the database, only 35 have less water than Pakistan — many of them the parched countries of the Gulf that are seeking the water-laden farmland they lack at home.

Indeed, quests for overseas farmland are water hunts as much as they are land hunts. Yet investors are seemingly so seduced by Islamabad’s legal and financial inducements that they disregard the fact that Pakistan’s water supply can barely sustain its own farming, much less that of immense foreign agribusiness projects.

Pakistan’s water and energy shortages could also limit the possible benefits accruing from the deals, including better technology, more employment and higher crop yields. With limited energy to operate upgraded farm machinery, and limited water to irrigate cropland, farming job prospects could suffer and talk of increased yields could become irrelevant.

Land deals could mean not just compromised small-holder livelihoods but also widespread displacement. Not surprisingly, critics argue that big land acquisitions could spark violent responses and mass political unrest. Such predictions may be premature — other than in Madagascar, opposition has been relatively localized — but they are not far-fetched in Pakistan.

Here’s why. According to the World Food Program, 77 million Pakistanis are already food-insecure, and many of them live in the country’s most volatile areas. Foreign land holdings could cause a flare-up of this food vulnerability powder keg at the worst possible time. During the height of last year’s global food crisis, Pakistan imposed export bans to keep domestic food prices down.
According to a report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, the UAE — which hopes to grow rice and wheat in Pakistan — then requested blanket exemptions from these bans.

Islamabad eventually relaxed export restrictions on Basmati rice. So a politically explosive scenario — such as the UAE trucking rice out of a drought-stricken or war-ravaged Pakistan and exporting it back to the Gulf while hungry locals look on — is not at all unrealistic. Throw that investment-protecting security force into the mix, and things could get really ugly.

Furthermore, there are long-standing rifts between Pakistan’s rural poor and its wealthy, landholding elite. Scores of huge land acquisitions — particularly if they displace poor laborers — would exacerbate these class-based cleavages.

Ominously, the Taliban’s actions in Swat reveal a new ability to exploit class divisions by pitting landless farmers against their landlords. Militants may well use farmland acquisitions as a pretext for fomenting a fresh class revolt in Punjab, the fertile, populous province coveted by the Taliban and reportedly ground zero for the farms race in Pakistan. Such a thought is enough to make one wonder if those farmland road shows are really worth the effort.

Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Bottom photo: CARE food aid in Pakistan. Courtesy flickr user Feinstein International Center.

Top photo: Gilgit, Pakistan. Courtesy flickr user michaelnewport.

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Christian Aid’s “Growing Pains: The Possibilities and Problems of Biofuels” finds that “huge subsidies and targets in developed countries for boosting the production of fuels from plants such as maize and palm oil are exacerbating environmental and social problems in poor nations.”

The Population Reference Bureau’s 2009 World Population Data Sheet shows that global population numbers will reach 7 billion in 2011. Among its key findings, PRB notes that “population growth is one root cause of increases in global greenhouse gas emissions. But the complexity of the mechanisms through which demographic factors affect emissions is not fully taken into consideration in many analyses that influence governments’ climate change mitigation efforts.”

A study published in Conservation Letters finds that emphasizing the ways the environment benefits the world’s poor “is a substantial improvement over dollar-based, ecosystem-service valuations that undervalue the requirements of the world’s poor” and “offers great hope for reconciling conservation and human development goals.”

“[F]or global trade, global food security, and global energy security, the Indian Ocean is critical,” says Amit Pandya in The Indian Ocean: Resource and Governance Challenges, the most recent addition to the Stimson Center’s Regional Voices: Transnational Challenges report series. “And it remains a stage for the pursuit of the global strategic and regional military interests of all world and regional powers.”

During a launch event on May 21, Pandya—the project director behind the series—sat with Stimson Director Ellen Laipson, Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, USN (Ret.), and East-West Center in Washington Director Satu Limaye to reflect on the report and discuss the myriad challenges facing Indian Ocean states in the maritime resources and governance sectors.

The 21st Century’s “Center Stage”

The Indian Ocean’s international profile has been bolstered by the region’s rising economic prowess and political clout, significant resource wealth, and critical shipping routes—which transport the vast majority of oil leaving the Persian Gulf. Journalist Robert Kaplan recently labeled the region “center stage for the 21st century” because of its importance to global trade and energy, as well as the fact that it hosts the “dynamic great-power rivalry” between India and China.

The Stimson report is divided into two sections: the first comprises several articles written by authors from Indian Ocean littoral states, while the second includes pieces from Pandya and Laipson that analyze and interpret general trends in regional ocean governance.

Ocean Resources, Maritime Security

“In the last half-century, the production of fish and fish products in the Indian Ocean (IO) region has increased tremendously as a result of improvements in fish capture technology and rising demand caused by a growing global population,” write Edward N. Kimani et al. in their article in the report, which examines southwest Indian Ocean fisheries. These trends have precipitated conflict between small-scale artisanal fishers and industrial fishers, in addition to placing enormous pressure on ocean ecosystems. Effective management mechanisms must be implemented in order to address overfishing and its consequences for global food security and ecosystems. (A forthcoming documentary, The End of the Line, takes an in-depth look at overfishing.)

In a similar vein, Mak Joon Num’s contribution, “Pirates, Barter Traders, and Fishers: Whose Rights, Whose Security?”—roundly praised by speakers at the report launch—considers the diverse range of stakeholders operating in the Straits of Malacca and the Sulu Sea. Malaysian trawler fishers, Acehnese pirates, and Filipino barter traders compete to glean their livelihoods from the ocean. All are victims and predators in their own right, Mak Joon Num argues, and climate change, poverty, and a lack of coordinated ocean governance policies exacerbate the present problems of resource scarcity, disputed sovereignty, and unsustainability.

Shifting to the northwestern littoral states of the Indian Ocean, Mustafa Alani presses the case for a comprehensive maritime security compact in the Persian Gulf, which holds more than 30 percent of the world’s known oil deposits. The Gulf Cooperation Council provides the foundational structure for such an agreement, which would likely comprise several levels of cooperation, ranging from “soft security”—managing fishing and environmental degradation, search-and-rescue coordination, and marine transport—to “strategic security”—coordinating naval exercises and anti-terrorism operations.

Questions of Governance

In order to address these challenges, concerned states must put forth “more effort at the national level to integrate civilian and military aspects of maritime policy,” Laipson concludes in the report’s final lines. “We also need a fresh look at the regional and international levels to ensure that governance of the maritime realm strives to manage the complex interplay of human and natural activity and to maintain the Indian Ocean as a sustainable zone for commerce, energy, security, and peace.”

Population: A Missing Factor?

While the report does an excellent job of illuminating the resource and governance challenges in the Indian Ocean, it fails to substantively consider one factor that will have a profound influence on all others: population growth. Burgeoning populations in Indian Ocean states will have considerable consequences for resource management, governance, poverty, and security in the region, particularly in relation to migration, human trafficking, overfishing, and ecosystem health.

Photo: Artisanal fishers off the Malabar coast of India. Courtesy Flickr user mckaysavage.

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Troubled Waters: Climate Change, Hydropolitics, and Transboundary Resources, a recent report by the Stimson Center’s “Regional Voices: Transnational Challenges” project, exemplifies the kind of integrated analysis that needs to be done on global security, governance, and environmental issues. I want to highlight four areas where the report points us in the right direction for this kind of work:

1. It takes a regional approach. Regions have historically been neglected as units of analysis, and there has not been enough focus on regional institutions. We organize our foreign assistance on an overwhelmingly bilateral basis; we have country strategies and spend much of our money bilaterally. Yet river basins or other ecosystems are almost always transboundary and therefore regional. The chapters in this report show time and again that bilateral approaches are not sufficient to meet the challenges posed by climate change’s impacts on the hydrological cycle.

2. It examines what climate change means in specific contexts. In year of Copenhagen, we need to be talking about global targets and timetables, grand bargains, and massive mitigation. But we must keep a parallel focus on what climate change will mean in specific sectors (e.g., water, food, desertification), in specific locations, and for specific groups (e.g., the poor).

The report has many examples of where glacial and snowmelt patterns have big impacts many hundreds and thousands of miles away. My own program just hosted a conference in Bangkok where we had the India-based expert on glacial melt in the Tibetan plateau talking with USAID environment officers in Southeast Asia. We need more of these kinds of conversations.

3. It takes a holistic, integrated approach toward analyzing problems and recommending responses. This report makes explicit the importance of the analytical and policy connections among climate change, water, governance, conflict, and cooperation. However, governments, NGOs, donors, and international bodies remain wedded to stovepiped, single-sector approaches to diagnosing and responding to problems. This must change.

In 2009 in Washington, there is a greater appetite and a better political environment for taking on a broader approach. This has been framed as rebalancing the “3Ds” of defense, diplomacy, and development; as “sustainable security”; and as “smart power.” Whatever the name, environmental issues such as climate change and water should be front and center in these discussions.

4. It has a nuanced view of conflict and cooperation over natural resources. The report—and David Michel’s chapter in particular—successfully highlights the geopolitical implications of changes in climate and water without inaccurately hyping “water wars.” As we know, there is extensive subnational conflict around water, and we are likely to see more of this type of conflict under the conditions described in Troubled Waters. But states frequently work hard to cooperate and deflect violent conflict over transboundary water.

However, we need greater political and financial investment in transboundary institutions, as international cooperation around water doesn’t happen without a lot of effort. It needs to happen, though, because the future may be more dangerous than the past when it comes to water conflict and cooperation.

As we move forward on the water conflict and cooperation agenda, let’s not just focus on onset of conflict. Let’s be sure to look all along the conflict continuum, from prevention, to conflict, to post-conflict, and evaluate the high-politics importance of water at each of these stages.

I’ll end with an example of where we could broaden our approach to water in a current Washington policy context. Senator Dick Durbin recently introduced the Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act of 2009, which builds on the Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act of 2005. The new bill is heavily focused on access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene, which are indeed pressing priorities. It says some of the right things about transboundary water, but historically, this has received little funding.

Further complicating efforts to secure more robust funding for transboundary water management and security is the fact that other water activities are usually funded through the Department of State, but transboundary efforts are often put through a multilateral institution like the World Bank—and the Department of the Treasury, not State, typically manages that relationship. This complicated tangle of agencies and institutions emphasizes my earlier point that foreign assistance is too stovepiped, and that we must get better at working across sectors.

Photo: The Nile River Basin is shared by 10 countries. Courtesy of Flickr user Michael Gwyther-Jones.

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