African Water Development Report 2006 - United Nations Economic ...

1000 to 2000 cubic meters (m3) per person peryear to designate danger of water-stress. Whenthe figures drop below 1000 m3 per person peryear, nations are considered water scarce, whichmeans that lack of water becomes a severe constrainton food production, economic development,and protection of natural systems. Today,26 countries with 232 million people belongto this group. The key word here is the sharingof a common water resource. The problem liesat the nexus between what essentially is a zerosumgame, and the peculiarities of the upstreamdownstreamdilemma: when the sum of the riparianStates’ water withdrawals from a sharedriver approaches the finite flow of the river, anyfurther withdrawals from an upstream Statewill mean less water for the downstream ones.Conflicts between countries over such sharedwater resources occur in all parts of the world.Most often, they are about dividing the quantityof water in a river between riparian States, butthey may also be about water quality (pollutionmeans a scarcity of usable water for downstreamrecipients), and about groundwater withdrawals(aquifers know no borders). It is important tounderstand the limitations of attempts to overcomethe zero-sum game by attempts to increasesupply (ibid).Confidence-buildingThere are in fact ways to increase the supply (flow)of a river. The clue lies in minimizing the largeevaporation losses that follow whenever water isspread out over a large area in a hot and arid climate.Such spreading-out may occur naturally (aprime example is the Sudd Marshes on the Nilein southern Sudan), or more commonly, throughthe building of dams in flat areas (such as theAswan Dam). The Aswan Dam is actually situatedin a singularly bad position from the pointof view of evaporation losses. Residing on Egyptianterritory close to the border with the Sudan,it covers an enormous area in order to capture anamount of water sufficient to maintain the flowof the Nile through Egypt even during severaldry years in a row. The same amount of storedwater, and the same regulatory function, could,in principle, be obtained from building a dam onthe Blue Nile, in the Ethiopian mountain gorges,but with a much lower cost of evaporation losses,since a dam of similar volume there would havemuch less surface area (ibid).A joint Egyptian-Sudanese-Ethiopian project inEthiopia thus would result in more water to beshared among the riparian States. The problem,of course, is that to the Egyptians, such a solutionis unacceptable on two grounds: as thingsstand at present, they could never leave the fateof their agricultural production capability to thegoodwill of Ethiopia. Secondly, they could nevertrust Ethiopia not to use the Dam for irrigationprojects of their own, thus diverting potentiallylarger amounts of water from the upper Nilethan now (ibid). The same, unfortunately, appliesto the now-aborted project to dry up the SuddMarshes by building the Jonglei Canal. Any attemptby the Sudanese to use the canal to divertwater for irrigation would be a threat to downstreamEgypt, since it could potentially meanlarger water withdrawals than present evaporationlosses. Two lessons could perhaps be derivedfrom these examples. The extra amount of waterto be obtained from attempts to increase thesupply in rivers may not be that large (particularlycompared to the magnitude of steadily risingdemands), and realizing what potential there iscrucially depends on creating enough confidencebetween the riparian States (ibid). The presentinstitutional framework of the Nile Basin Initiative(see Box 11.4) is expected to move in thisdirection. In fact, the pressures on riparian Statesto cooperate in managing shared water-resourcesare so strong that in many cases, pragmatismtends to overcome a less-than-perfect internationallegal framework. Towards this objectivethe Nile Basin Initiative has designed sub-basincooperative projects among the relevant ripariancountries as Subsidiary Action Programmes(SAP). An example is the Eastern Nile projectinvolving Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt to be implementedwithin Ethiopia (Table 11.4).SHARING WATER FOR REGIONAL INTEGRATION263