Water: The International Crisis.

This work was inspired by the Swedish Red Cross's efforts to prevent disasters. In the 1989 Swedish Red Cross meeting in Linkoping University (summary reports are included in the appendix), it was concluded that solutions to problems of water shortage are to be found in natural resource conservation and management that consider the complexity, diversity and risk-proneness that characterize the semi-arid environments. The author highlights a criticism of the World Commission on Environment and Development's (WCED) document "Our Common Future" by the International Water Resources Association which has sub-chapters on the oceans, space, and the Antarctic but not one on fresh water - "the blood and the lymph of the geophysical system."

The inelastic demand for fresh water (which will just be referred to as "water") is acknowledged - fulfills a number of functions where there is no substitute. Clarke also explains that the cause of the food crises of the 1970s and 1980s in Africa was really lack of water and not food. Aside from reinforcing the water-diamond paradox found in the economics literature, the author laments at the relatively lower stature of water engineers in this day and age. In places where water is a problem (it is mentioned that rainfall in many desert regions is limited to a few millimeters a year, which often falls on unpredictable times during the space of a few isolated days), the problem is indeed that of human survival. The way rivers are used, large-scale irrigation or the damming of a major river can bring prosperity to a country where water availability is unreliable, but the same scheme can threaten countries further down the river with ecological and economic disaster. In third world countries, many new reservoirs and irrigation schemes have spread diseases deep into already sick areas and significantly failed to produce the economic impetus for which they were designed. This coupled with the ominous increase in global temperature that increases the evaporation rate in the hydrological cycle creates an alarming scenario. The Nile is used as an example.

Although it mentions the developed countries' investigations on the economics of using supertankers to deliver water, and studies on the prospect of towing icebergs from the Antarctic to melt down for tap water, the book's strong message is for policymakers to give traditional solutions a second look. The author uses as an example the hedging pastoralist who herds more cattle than he needs. He is not a greedy livestock supplier but is merely planning for the future, taking out an insurance against bad weather conditions that are detrimental to his crops. The success of the Bishnoi village as well as inhabitants in the Negev desert are extensively discussed. He however cautions that applicability of these experiences to tropical third world environments may not be appropriate (the Negev crops are grown during winter which is a season significantly different from spring or summer in this region). From this, Clarke concludes that farmers facing water scarcity problems should be presented with a basket of choices instead of transplantation of a single method or process that worked in one area but may not be appropriate in another. A questionable (in economic terms) and sweeping suggestion however was that semi-arid countries should import more food, grow less food, and export fewer water-intensive products. In an efficiency perspective, the country even if semiarid may have comparative advantage of producing the water-intensive goods over the country it plans to import these. Also, for the greater value-added, less water-intensive alternatives, the quantity that needs to be produced so the price is just equal to the additional cost may be too small or way below what other countries can produce at lower cost.

It may not be prudent to allow the market mechanism to function on its own especially if water conservation is a vital goal. The social marginal cost of depleting the resource is higher than the private marginal cost involved. An example is the reality of subtly conflicting goals such as irrigation versus waterlogging and salinization. Policymakers should be cautious and prudent in coming up with priorities or compromises.

The broad overview of this work allows Clarke to justify the inclusion of alarming messages such as those coming out of the 1988 IRWA IV World Congress on Water Resources in Ottawa May 30th to June 3rd 1988 (statement appears in appendix II) that water scarcity is expected to develop into a first rate issue within a few years time. It had a disturbing conclusion: "water will replace oil as the major crisis-generating issue on a global scale," in which case the water-diamond paradox will no longer be an enigma; once the dreaded reality removes any confusion.

John C. Mijares University of Houston