Wars over water will mark this century, the pessimists would have us believe. Alan Nicol argues that the reality is more complex, and that whilst efforts at achieving international co-operation over water management are gathering pace, our chief concern should be small, localised conflicts which affect the poor.

For Ato Wobeshet, a government farm manager, the crop is a disaster. He is standing in a field of cotton under the scorching sun in Ethiopia’s Awash valley, looking over the sea of green, waist-high plants. Picking up the immature cotton balls, he explains that a lack of irrigation has caused crop failure. He expects the harvest – which is dry and difficult to pick – to cost more and return far less than usual. Angry, he indicates the adjoining fields where, he says, new ‘private farmers’ are taking too much water from the system. And this year canal siltation upstream has further reduced the overall amount. He questions the farm’s long-term viability if the interests of adjoining farmers competing for scarce water cannot be reconciled with his.

But this is only half the story. The adjoining farmers are Afar pastoralists and Haj Hassan, an Afar elder, proudly shows his cotton crop, the second they have produced. The proceeds will be shared amongst his clan from the land they regard as their own. In fact, these fields have been the focus of conflict between farm managers and local pastoralists ever since their construction in the 1980s. This is typical of many other examples across Africa where irrigation has intruded on existing land use, causing displacement, the introduction of alien species and conflict between groups and with the government. Now the Afar want a piece of the ‘white gold’ from the land they claim, and the current political climate is providing it for them. Another Afar elder explains that they are now ‘the law’ in this area – no wonder Ato Wobeshet is loath to confront them.

Although this local conflict – and others like it – has lead to many deaths of workers and managers, it has rarely translated to higher level ‘water wars’. Whilst social and political fault lines at a local level over land ownership and sovereignty frequently exacerbate tensions and lead to such conflict, at a state level the international stakes are much higher and so the weight of conflict prevention measures that much greater. Nevertheless, it is not impossible to envisage larger-scale ‘water wars’, although the potentially huge (and futile) cost far outweighs any significant gain from ‘capturing’ water in this way. The international community has begun to recognise this fact.

Not far from Ato Wobeshet is the edge of the Blue Nile basin (Abbay in Amharic). From here the huge river tumbles through its gorge and down from the Ethiopian plateau towards the plains of Sudan, before joining the White Nile at Khartoum. From there it meanders on through the Nubian desert to Aswan in Egypt and the High Dam – a monumental symbol of Egypt’s water insecurity constructed during the 1960s under President Nasser. Its original aim was to ensure Egypt had the capacity to store the whole annual flood of the river Nile in order to secure against inter-annual fluctuations. But its symbolism was entirely political, and still is. Certainly during the dry years of the 1980s it provided an important buffer for Egypt’s agriculture, reaching dangerously low levels in 1988 at a time when Egypt and Ethiopia were trading threats over the Nile. But the predictions of many observers that war in the valley was a possibility have been confounded.

Since the early 1990s the nine Nile basin states (now ten with the inclusion of Eritrea) have been edging away from conflict and towards co-operation based on a shared vision of development within the valley. While the process may seem ponderous and overly-cautious to outsiders, the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) as it has been since 1998, is looking to the long term according to its main facilitating institution, the World Bank.

The NBI has an enormous task on its hands in resolving the contentious issue of the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement negotiated between Egypt and Sudan. So contentious, in fact, that the Agreement is hardly mentioned at all in the NBI literature. The 1959 Agreement divided up all the waters of the Nile between Egypt and Sudan based on an average annual Nile flow measured at Aswan in the early part of the 20th century to be 84 billion cubic metres (or 84 cubic kilometres) of water (55.5 billion cu m to Egypt and 18.5 billion cubic metres to Sudan with 10 billion cu m assumed to be lost to evaporation from the reservoir). Most other Nile basin states upstream were still British colonies at the time and their interests were ‘represented’ by the colonial power. Ethiopia, however, was not party to the agreement and has contested it ever since. Ethiopia used to claim sovereignty over all the water flowing within its territory, with Egypt insisting on its historical right to use the Nile flowing into its territory sovereign. For Ethiopia this ‘prior’ claim amounted to a check on its development and, particularly during the disastrous droughts in the 1980s, there was vocal opposition to Egypt’s claim. Now, however, there is a move towards establishing agreement on the ‘equitable’ utilisation of the waters, indicating, as a senior Bank official affirms, that the states have ‘come a long way’ from the rhetoric of the 1980s.

This initiative raises an important wider point about conflict prevention: whether co-operation over shared water resources can provide momentum towards solving conflicts both within and between states. This is a region in which seven – or eight if civil violence in Egypt is included – of the basin states are involved in protracted and often devastating conflicts (such as, for instance, the recent war between Eritrea and Ethiopia and the continuing civil war in south Sudan). At this stage the NBI is only sharing a vision of development; but as it begins to share the benefits of co-operative development, innovative approaches to state-state and state-society co-operation may open up new avenues for wider conflict prevention. But at present, it has a long way to go in this respect.

Witness the Middle East. The difficulties of shared water interests overriding wider political conflicts are currently evident in the recent Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, with potential knock-on effects on surrounding states such as Jordan and water-sharing arrangements already concluded with Israel. The economic security pay-offs in all water-scarce regions in the long-term of joint co-operation are enormous, but the immediate political barriers between states can be a formidable challenge.

Behind the claims and counter claims in all such contested river basins lie notions of scarcity and perceptions of food and water insecurity. Not surprisingly downstream states can feel threatened by the actions of their upstream neighbours and powerful downstream states can use their leverage to prevent upstream usage. Some of these concerns are very real and founded on a growing body of data relating to scarcity.

The World Water Vision document prepared for the Second World Water Forum in 2000 stated that population growth from 2000 to 2025 would cause average annual per capita availability of renewable freshwater to fall from 6,500 cu m to 4,800 cu m. In the more water-scarce basins, impact on availability would be greater. Some estimates suggest that if spatial distribution is added as a factor then 3 billion people would have to survive on less than 1,700 cubic metres per capita for all uses (including for growing food), below which quantity they would suffer water stress. The assumptions behind such data are great (and their full analysis beyond the scope of this article), but they do suggest a static notion of water availability which is linked closely to the idea of food self-sufficiency. Egypt, for instance, which is 98 per cent dependent on the Nile for water, has had to import food since the late 1970s in order to cover its population requirements. Were conflict inevitable over scarce water then one might assume conflict to have broken out already on the Nile basin and in the Middle East. As some analysts have shown, there are, however, substitutes for ‘water for food’ to be found in the world food markets.

Professor Tony Allan at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London has coined the term ‘virtual water’ to describe what he regards as the most important aspect of trade in foods, namely the trade in water used in situ to grow a given quantity of a crop. This is an important concept to bear in mind when considering that to keep up with global population growth irrigated areas are expected to have to expand some 30 per cent by 2025, according to the likes of FAO. This will mean an increase in water use by perhaps 17 per cent. In water-scarce areas, this will entail a major challenge to governments and societies to meet food production needs and, if the pessimists prevail, will probably lead to increased conflict over access to scarce water in river basins and aquifers. However, the idea of substituting this ‘virtual water’ for real water recognises that ‘secure water’ for food need not be the same water running through your territory. But the implications are numerous and painful for states unable to reallocate scarce water quickly and efficiently to higher value uses and for large populations to find other livelihood strategies. The adaptive capacity, as it has been called, of states and societies to change water-use habits is all important, but is only beginning to be understood.

Current attempts by states to pursue unilateral solutions in water-scarce regions of the world including the Middle East and southern Africa have continued to cause tensions. Turkey on the Tigris and Euphrates has been alarming Syria and Iraq through its continuing unilateral development of the Greater Anatolia Project. And Botswana has been concerned by the ambitions of Namibia to divert some of the waters of the Okavango. Different conceptions of rights over water are held by different states in such basins, affecting their ability to establish a starting point for co-operation and a defusing of tensions. And as ‘facts on the ground’ are constructed, so reconciliation and trust are further diminished.

It has taken many decades since the construction of the Aswan High Dam and the flooding of Nubia by the lake which it created for the Nile riparians to sit down and begin co-operation. All the states now recognise that shared benefits are essential for their economic and political well-being. And surely the lessons being learnt will be important for other basins, such as those in the Middle East and southern Africa. But a key question is: can they be learnt at all levels? And what do they mean for local conflict, where most problems are likely to develop in the coming decades? They may not grab the headlines, but local violence and tensions over access to water may be just as damaging and costly in terms of impact on the livelihoods of the poor and on the environment. For Ato Wobeshet, the tools to reach reconciliation and compromise are not at his disposal, but they need to be provided. At the sharp end of water scarcity, the luxury of shared visions is confronted by the uncomfortable reality of poverty. The skills of local-level ‘diplomats’ and policy makers will be key in ensuring that this does not become a century of conflict over water between communities and households, rather than states and governments.

Alan Nicol is a Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute in London.

WHO facts about water

• Every eight seconds, a child dies of a water-related disease
• Around one billion people in the world still lack safe water, and more than two billion do not have adequate sanitation facilities
• Adequate access to water is defined as 20-40litres of water per person per day, located within a reasonable distance from the household
• Nearly 2.5 million people die annually from diarrhoea diseases, including dysentry
• There are 600,000 deaths every year from typhoid fever
• 80 per cent of people without adequate sanitation in developing countries live in rural areas.