We keep hearing from the ‘intellectual lot’ around us that an inevitable war awaits us all. Yes, the wars over water. But many of us are hardly aware that wars over water have already started. Darfur was a water war!! It was a water dispute that broke between the farmers and nomads that the government then took advantage of, instead of helping to solve the dispute.
According to the experts, the disturbance that occurs in the nomad areas of Middle East is very much about inequitable access to water. In fact China too is very conscious about this drastic change and is willing to start work on a great pipeline that would help it to take water from Tibetan Himalayas that belongs to rivers that feed Asia.
We have already witnessed great fights between big corporations and small communities.
Cochabamba late 90’s in Bolivia is the place that saw the first ever water war, when Bechtel, the big engineering company, stood up and set a subsidy on drinking water on a for-profit basis. And the price exceeded triple what it was before that. It didn’t stop here; the company stood again for an atrocious cause and told people that “they will be charged for the water they collect from ‘RAIN’ in big cisterns and pots on your roof.
The company claimed all water here belongs to them which resulted in a civil war which emerged as a strong struggle. The people won. Bechtel was forced to leave. But the whole story dented the idea of equal distribution of resources and harrowed the idea of inevitable war if nothing is done.
Watch more http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ov6ztnqfGc
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Cochabamba late 90’s in Bolivia is the place that saw the first ever water war, when Bechtel, the big engineering company, stood up and set a subsidy on drinking water on a for-profit basis. And the price exceeded triple what it was before that. It didn’t stop here; the company stood again for an atrocious cause and told people that “they will be charged for the water they collect from ‘RAIN’ in big cisterns and pots on your roof.
The company claimed all water here belongs to them which resulted in a civil war which emerged as a strong struggle. The people won. Bechtel was forced to leave. But the whole story dented the idea of equal distribution of resources and harrowed the idea of inevitable war if nothing is done.Watch more http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ov6ztnqfGc
