For Asia, a vicious cycle of flood and drought
By Thomas Fuller
International Herald Tribune
Standing on top of the dike holding back the floodwaters that engulfed entire villages here, it is difficult to imagine that this is a country that also suffers widespread annual droughts. In recent weeks the relentless rush of the Chao Phraya River and its tributaries ruined thousands of acres of farmland and caused the deaths by drowning of 86 people.
Yet six months from now attention in Thailand is likely to shift, as it has in recent years, to the parched, sandy-soiled northeastern parts of the country and the industrial zones southeast of Bangkok running out of water.
The pattern of chronic flooding and chronic droughts is now familiar here and in other parts of the world witnessing unusually harsh weather. But in Asia these water problems come with an added challenge.
Taken together, Asia has less fresh water - 3,920 cubic meters, or 138,000 cubic feet, per person - than any other continent outside of Antarctica, according to a report by the United Nations.
When the capacity of lakes, rivers and groundwater are added up, Asia has marginally less water per person than Europe or Africa, one-quarter that of the North America, nearly one-tenth that of South America and 20 times less than Australia and the Pacific islands.
"We do not have a water crisis. We have a management crisis," said Witoon Permpongsacharoen, secretary general of the Foundation for Ecological Recovery, a nonprofit organization in Bangkok.
In some parts of Asia the main problem is lopsided availability - in China water is plentiful in the south but not in the north. Yet throughout the region experts say nature often cannot be blamed: Water is polluted, wasted and misused.
There are bright spots in Asia. Singapore, which relies on - and is in some ways hostage to - the water piped from neighboring Malaysia, has an aggressive water harvesting and recycling system that seeks to use the interior of the island-state as a giant catchment area. Phnom Penh, where a decade ago only about one in five families had access to piped water, now has one of the most efficient municipal water systems in developing Asia. And Thailand has hooked up nearly 100 percent of its rural areas to sanitation systems, a remarkable feat for a country with such a sizable hinterland.
The bigger picture in Asia, however, is that water woes are becoming a threat to economic growth: steel, computer chip and paper factories, among others, need large amounts of water; intensive farming is both draining and polluting fresh water resources; and as the 3.8 billion people who live in the region grow richer they are using more household machines - dishwashers, clothes-washing machines - which leads to leaps in water consumption.
The UN report, the State of the Environment in Asia and the Pacific , says that during a "normal year" China is short 40 billion cubic meters of water. This summer, in one of the worst droughts in decades, at least 18 million people were affected by the shortage of drinking water, mainly in the southwest.
"Asia is already running beyond its ecological means," said Rae Kwon Chung, director of the environment and sustainable development division of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. "And water is one of the most symbolic cases of this deficit."
Where there are shortages there is the potential for conflict. Competition for access to water is causing political tensions within societies - between farmers and factory owners, between urban and rural populations - and rifts between countries that share rivers.
Two dams in China on the Mekong River have angered fishermen and farmers in Vietnam, Thailand and Laos,
who say fish stocks have dropped and salt water is seeping into the delta. China is building at least three more dams on the Mekong.
In the longer term, there could be less water to share. Global warming is melting the glaciers that feed Asia's largest rivers - the Ganges, Indus, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow. Because glaciers are a natural storage system, releasing water during hot arid periods, the shrinking ice sheets could aggravate water imbalances, causing flooding as the melting accelerates, followed by a reduction in river flows.
This problem is still years if not decades away, experts say, but is drawing increasing attention from industrialized nations - most recently Britain - concerned that a failure to act on climate change could have disastrous effects on the global economy. But in Asia the more immediate concern is getting drinking water to people.
About 669 million people in the region - more than twice the population of the United States - are without access to safe drinking water, according to the Asian Development Bank. The number of people in China alone who do not have access to clean water is nearly as large as those in the same circumstances in all ofAfrica.
Tap water in major Indian cities such as Delhi and Chennai typically flows only one or two hours daily. Municipal systems in Asia leak on average about half of their water, said Kallidaikurichi Easwaran Seetharam, a water expert at the Asian Development Bank in Manila.
"If you fix the leaks you are doubling the capacity," he said.
Asians use less water than, say, Americans - about 150 liters, or 40 gallons, a day, compared with about 400 liters a day in North America, Seetharam said - but the trend is toward greater water use. In China, daily household consumption increased from less than 100 liters in 1980 to 244 liters in 2000, according to UN statistics.
"If they try to replicate an American lifestyle, they will not be able to sustain themselves in Asia," Seetharam said.
The water problems are the underside of Asia's miracle growth, a reminder that hiding behind the skyscrapers and Mercedes-driving urban elites there is persistent underdevelopment, often wretched infrastructure and widespread pollution.
As the region's blackened waterways can attest, industrialization, pesticides and lack of proper sewage treatment are poisoning Asia's water. The starkest example of this came in November 2005 when the toxic chemicals benzene, nitrobenzene and aniline spilled into China's Songhua River and polluted the Harbin water supply.
Poorer countries in Asia need to inject billions of dollars into improving their water infrastructure to avoid further droughts, experts say. Witoon of the Foundation for Ecological Recovery says Asian nations should concentrate on restoring or preserving forests and swamps that serve as nature's water storage facilities - and absorb flood water during the monsoon.
But restoring wetlands or regrowing forests often means abandoning crops, a cruel trade-off for farmers. In the flooded village of Baan Saphan Thai, about an hour north of Bangkok, resentment already runs high that land is being flooded to keep water from seeping into the capital.
"The truth is that Bangkok is much lower lying but they keep the water away," said Pairath Supalkin, a farmer whose mango trees were killed by the floods. "Bangkok is a money city," he said bitterly as he stood on top of the dike next to his flooded house. "You can't let them go under water."
As this recent photo shows, the waterways of Bangkok are full to the brim.
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