In Britain it is hard to understand how we can be short of water, it rains all the time and foreigners tell us how bad our weather is, but our water shortage is part of a far more sinister global shortage. As the world’s population heads towards 7 billion, not only do more and more people require flushing toilets, baths and showers but we are progressively paving the Earth’s surface which leads to surface water running down to the sea, adding to the world’s salt water stocks, thus depleting the world’s fresh water system.

As mother earth gradually becomes drier, cities such as Mexico City are in danger of collapsing into a massive subterranean void, which was previously filled with water leaving the population with little to no water. China and others have progressively built huge dams that the weight of the water and the constructions themselves have affected the earth’s spin and deformed the earth’s crust, which is thought to be a cause for earthquakes. Geophysicists believe that the combination of the Earth’s rotation and gravitational field has been affected. Because of their massive surface area, dams, lead to a serious drain of the world’s water stocks by evaporation thus causing the loss of precious water and biodiversity. China uses so much water for industry that for months of the year, the Yellow River does not reach the sea. India’s pride, the great Ganges is now a mass of toxic sewage.

Like the air we breathe, water is one of life’s vitals; we cannot live without it and worldwide there is a move to privatise it. At the Hague Convention of 2002, water, which has been seen, as a right has been re-designated as a need. This single act changed everything, it now means that water is a commodity, to be bought and sold like petrol, the monopoly of the super rich and the subject of wars. The Hague Convention was only attended by the big names in the water industry such as Suez, SAUR Vivendi and Enron. The other interested parties were the IMF and the World Bank, who for some time have had the policy of making 3rd. world countries privatise their water supplies as part of their debt management.

Who benefits from the fraudulent way a basic human right to water has been stolen and another commodity for global business has been born? Some people in India now pay 25% of their income for water. Many indigenous peoples’ way of life is being destroyed. Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, in their book “For the Common Good” point out that the economics of imperative growth is on a collision course with the finite capital of the Earth’s resources.

Globalistic forms of industrial agriculture, deforestation, are destroying the natural world, desertification and loss of the world’s water, they say. Ecological collapse could come within a generation.

(Information drawn from “Blue Gold” by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke)

At great cost, desalinisation could be the ultimate answer to the above, but with the lack of interest by Governments, many of the worldwide population will suffer horrific droughts before a responsible body provides a positive answer to the question “Can human life exist without water?”

What thoughts do you have on the subject?