Recently, I listened to a rather spirited debate on BBC about the world's water supply. The subject was: Is there a global water shortage? And now, despite the rains, we are facing a water shortage here, and police are guarding distribution centers.
The answer to the debate seemed to be that the problem is access to water rather than water supply. One billion people don't have access to clean water, (hence, the high incidence of water-borne diseases, such as cholera). Statistics suggest that in another ten years, the situation will only worsen, given the present situation.
Harvesting clean water can range from simply putting out containers to catch rainwater, to massive de-desalination plants which require large-scale funding. The city-state of Singapore, which is a developed country, financially, has relied on de-desalination, but, according to a representative of that country, who engaged in the BBC debate, it faces a water shortage. The problem is an expanding population that requires an increasing supply of water and they have already run out of land for reservoirs to store the water.
Water rights can create conflicts between individual farmers and ranchers, between towns and cities, and between countries. Just this year, when North Korea released water from a dam without warning neighbor South Korea with whom it shares the river, the sudden surge of water in the river caused six deaths. Since then, when heavy rains required another release of water, South Korea was notified.
In the year 2000, Senator George McGovern, then the US representative to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), pointed out that there had been wars over land and over oil and he predicted that within 15 years, there might be wars over water. Fortunately that didn't materialize. But it is still a threat.
Technologies already exist to purify water from rivers and seas and even to extract moisture from the air and convert it into drinking water.
If the rains are not sufficient to meet the city's needs here in Manila, the next step being considered is to seed clouds over the Angat Dam, which is a main source of supply.
As the 18th century American sage Benjamen Franklin said, "We don't realize the value of water until the well is dry."
