Did you know that the UN estimates that two-thirds of the world’s population – over four billion people – currently face water shortages during at least a month a year? By 2050 the UN World Water Development Report predicts that this number could exceed six billion.
On March 4, some of the implications of the intensifying global water shortage were spelled out in a Harvard Law School talk given by a third year law student and former member of the US military, Steven Kerns.
‘A call to action: global water security and the US’ included case studies from Gaza and the West Bank, with a focus on the Jordan Valley; the Lake Chad region where the vanishing lake has caused thirst in Niger, Chad, Nigeria and Cameron leading the group Boko Haram to turn to violence; the stressed Indus border region where India has been courting war by withholding water from Pakistan’s farmers; the dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over Ethiopia’s construction of a dam that would affect 85 percent of the Nile’s headwaters; the consecutive droughts that culminated in the Syrian civil war.
Interwoven throughout Kerns’ commentary were US-based water crises in Flint, in California’s Central Valley, in the eight states fed by the Colorado River Basin, and the impending calamity that awaits the middle of the country with the rapid depletion of the huge Ogallala aquifer which he sees as an urgent national security matter demanding Congressional action.
While the connection Kerns made between the global water shortage and food insecurity, human rights abuses, rise in forced migration, xenophobia and warfare was profoundly sobering, in one respect his talk was quite refreshing.
He did not pull his punches where Palestine was concerned. His description of Israel’s ‘apartheid water policies’ (a term he used on several occasions) and the water pillage and theft Israel practiced to “coerce and displace” Palestinians must have jolted the law school audience. Kerns had worked on water issues with the Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq, and was clearly outraged by his encounter with the huge disparities – sometimes more than 10 to 1 – between water available to a West Bank settler and that allotted to a Palestinian mother in the Jordan Valley who had no water to wash the clothes of her children.
Kerns’ talk was a timely prelude to World Water Day, marked annually by the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine. If you are in the Boston area, we hope you will join us on March 22 for a Stand Out on the bridge in the Boston Public Gardens at noon, followed by a forum from 5 – 8 at the North American Indian Center in Boston. FB event
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
The Alliance and friends stand out for World Water Day, 2019. Photo credit: Larry Aaronson