WORLD WATER WEEK:
Two Opposing Worlds Meet;
Development or Death
by Hussein Askary
Sept. 9—The Stockholm World Water Week, Aug. 26-31, sponsored by the Swedish state's International Development Cooperation Agency, and such global cartel companies such as Nestle and PepsiCo, but dominated by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Stockholm Environmental Institute, and similar malthusian propaganda outlets, promised to be orgy in green ideological madness, where African and Asian nations are regarded by Europe and the U.S.A. as an embarrassing burden, and that those nations should be convinced that their misery could only be reduced, but not relieved, by small hand-outs, instead of large-scale industrial and infrastructural development.
In recent years, World Water Week (WWW) has become an exhibition exposing the economic and moral bankruptcy of the trans-Atlantic world, while the rest of the world, Africa especially, is on its way to getting a divorce from it.
The world has changed dramatically since the Copenhagen 2009 Climate Change Summit where nations of Africa and South America, backed by China, India, and South Africa, nearly staged a walkout from the conference. Their message was: Our national sovereignty and right to development are still sacred principles. The demise of the British-dominated financial and banking systems since then, has made this bankruptcy even more obvious. This year the Africans came to Stockholm with a different character and attitude, proudly presenting their relatively bold development programs, telling Europe and the United States (still in a friendly tone to avoid political tension): "These are our visions. Take them or leave us alone!"
The only ones who dared to mention the fact of the trans-Atlantic bankruptcy were the LaRouche movement organizers who, not being invited, stood outside the conference compound, distributing hundreds of pieces of literature and talking to many delegates. Their discussions with the attendees reflected the same phenomena observed inside the conference.
Almost exclusively, all European and American attendees attacked the idea of nuclear power, and any large-scale or continental water projects, as proposed by the LaRouche movement. Sometimes, their reactions became violent, because the presence of the "LaRouchies" disturbed what they intended to be a controlled environment inside the conference. On the contrary, African and Asian delegates welcomed these large-scale infrastructure ideas, and expressed their support for them.
One aspect which shaped the discussions is the shift in the economic tendency in the world, as in the Pacific region, where China, Russia, India, and their allies have taken a different course for dealing with the economic crisis. Their method is based on the best of those utilized by such great Western leaders as American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, putting emphasis on large-scale infrastructure and science programs. These policies have been abandoned in the West since the murder of President John F. Kennedy, and replaced by the anti-industrial and superstitious green ideology on the one hand, and financial speculation on the other.
The impact of the real economic cooperation between China and Africa was discussed on the sidelines, though not openly. China's own development programs, such as dam building, were attacked by several Western speakers in the conference (see below).
For the first time, EIR was inside the conference, as this reporter was covering the conference as part of the press corps.
Confab Host: Africa Biofuels Scandal
The main sponsor of World Water Week, the Swedish Ministry of International Development Cooperation (IDC), is itself involved in a number of scandals related to depriving African farmers of their land and water for food production, in order to produce biofuels. The scandals around the IDC, which were revealed by a reporter of the Swedish radio program Ekot, are related to the Swedfund, a wholly IDC-funded hedge fund. Ekot focussed on one of the many Swedfund projects which is carried out in Sierra Leone.
The available evidence shows that Swedfund, in collaboration with the biofuel company Addax, has fraudulently stolen productive land from farmers to produce biofuels. This has caused both water shortages and hunger among the farm families.
In the village of Woreh Yeama, for example, the contract made with the farmers, which they did not really understand, states that they will lease their land for 50 years (!) to Addax for $3.20 per year/acre. The farmers were promised jobs in Addax, and health care and schools for their children. None of this materialized.
The water in the area is used for irrigating the sugar cane to produce ethanol for automobiles in Europe. So, the population is starving and thirsting in Sierra Leone due to the Swedish aid project.
This is your host of the World Water Week!
Biofuels Defended 'Objectively'
A one-day WWW seminar was arranged to deal with the question of biofuels, water, and food security. Here, the organizers had the following to say about the disgusting use of land and water resources for the production of biofuels:
"Bioenergy and water are inextricably linked. In an already water-stressed world, bioenergy development may in places compete with other water and land uses such as crop cultivation for food production. At the same time, by leveraging the introduction of efficient water management techniques and providing energy for water pumping and cleaning, bioenergy development also provides opportunities to improve water productivity and increase access to water. Proper integration of bioenergy systems into forestry and agriculture can even reduce some of the impacts of present land use, such as eutrophication and soil erosion. Concerns remain however, that exploitation of water resources in bioenergy projects may undermine sustainable livelihoods in producer countries, and that existing policy frameworks and voluntary sustainability standards are inadequate."
Thus did the seminar deal with the issue "objectively," as stated above, while no mention was made of the crimes committed by the state-funded companies and their collaborating "charitable" hedge funds and companies in Sierra Leone and Tanzania.
Solving Problems or Dying Slowly
The most striking phenomenon between, on the one hand, the African and Asian WWW participants, mostly from the Indian Subcontinent and Southwest Asia (as China and Russia, interestingly, were not participating or probably not invited), and their European and American counterparts, is that the former focused, in their presentations, on solving the water-and-food crisis, while the latter focused on the problems themselves, as allegedly caused by population growth, and the aspiration of the developing nations to develop modern economies. The malthusian ideology of Limits to Growth of the Club of Rome and the WWF's anti-human population prejudices, were predominant in the presentations of the European and American delegations.
These trans-Atlantic nations' speakers focused solely on "environmental" crises, repeating ad nauseam such sickening jargon as "ecological foot prints," "carrying capacity," "scarcity," "conflicts over limited resources," "pollution due to population growth," "transparency," "governance" of resources (meaning abolishing the responsibility of the sovereign governments to make decisions about their natural resources and economic policies, by handing power down to local inhabitants, international NGOs, and multinational corporations), and similar gobbledygook.
Their arguments, put simply, are that human beings cannot create new resources. They base everything on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, claiming that everything—including life and human civilization—will, sooner or later, die off, in a heat death. Human beings speed up that process by attempting to alter nature's order, through their selfish aspiration to have higher living standards, by using their creativity to develop ever-more advanced forms of technology, and thus, higher and more dense forms of power.
So, the only way to deal with this, the green ideology asserts, is to "slow down" human activity, and condemn life to a slow death instead!
But since human nature rejects such notions, they have to be packaged in glossy pseudo-scientific computer models, or, simply imposed by force on weaker nations, or by denying them the technological means for development.
Having excluded nuclear power, and creation of new water resources through desalination or transfer of water, the only thing left to think about is how to survive in a vicious world with limited resources. For Africa, Asia, and South America, this means to coexist with misery and poverty in a "transparent" way, and by managing the poverty equally and with "good governance."
This is no mere academic chatter. It is the strategic policy of the U.S. Administration under President Barack Obama, among others. This was revealed in "The Global Water Security" report, issued in February of this year by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It is based on the same premise, i.e., that you can only manage scarcity, not create new resources. "We assume that water management technologies will mature along present rates and that no far reaching improvements will develop and be deployed over the next 30 years," it stated. It foresees "water wars" and social upheavals as a consequence.
The Trans-Atlantic Non-Vision
A screening of the various papers presented at the conference (Source: "Abstract Volume, World Water Week in Stockholm, August 26-31, 2012, Water and Food Security"), gives a taste of the deadly non-vision from the trans-Atlantic elites. For example:
Two papers presented an attack on China's development plans, which, in reality, are inspiring other developing countries. One, by Dr. Thomas Henning, Philipps University, Marburg, Germany, is titled "Implications of Yunnan's Aggressive Hydropower Development on Regional Food Security, Changing Land Utilization and Livelihood." The second, by Stuart Orr, WWF International, Switzerland, titled, "Dams on the Mekong River: Lost Fish Protein and the Implications for Land and Water Resources," attacked China and its allies in the Mekong River Basin.
Henning writes:
"China is aggressively developing its energy sector in which hydropower plays a crucial role. Within China, Yunnan province has a key role for hydropower development, making it even a global key region for hydropower. In about 15 years it will have an installed hydropower capacity of more than 90 GW. It is based either on often controversial large projects (LHP) along major rivers or on smaller projects (SHP), both creating hydroscapes. SHP are often considered a priori an environmentally and socially sound renewable energy. But in Yunnan they are falling into one of the richest bio-, geo- and ethnic[ally] diverse regions. There is a notable lack of knowledge studying the cumulative implications of the SHPs, including its consequences on food security, changing land utilization and livelihood for the diverse ethnic groups."
The WWF, which is generally concerned with wildlife, is suddenly worried about the threatened loss of protein intake of human beings in the Mekong River Basin region, from potential changes in fish habitat and migration in the river, were China and its neighbors to proceed on their plans to develop hydropower, modern agriculture, and industries in the Basin.
Orr writes:
"Most of the 12 million households in the Lower Mekong Basin would be affected by alteration of fish availability, as fish is the main source of dietary protein. Estimating the water (water footprint) and land area (land footprint) that would inevitably increase in order to replace lost protein from fish catch, is one of the most important challenges in terms of addressing key impacts of the Mekong River basin dams."
Having excluded aquaculture (fish farms), a common practice in northern Europe, as "impossible" in the Mekong River, the WWF is attacking the idea of allocating new land for modern agriculture and livestock to produce more protein for the population as man increases his "footprint" on nature.
These arguments, like Thomas Malthus's attempt to prove his theory of population as mathematically sound, by excluding from the equation—or computer model for his modern-day followers—technological improvements from the production process that yield increased food production per capita/square kilometer, these quackademics are not falling far from the tree. However, this is no mere academic discussion: If these types of persons are allowed to shape policy in the Western world that can hinder real development in the developing world, they would contributing to massive crimes against humanity.
Pessimistic Prognostications
Another case of locking the doors of the theater and shouting fire, is a paper introduced by Dr. Dieter Gerten from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, the same institute which was co-founded by such anti-human population ideologues as Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. While on the face of it, Gerten's paper sounds positive, as it is titled "Water Requirements for Future Global Food Production, Potentials of On-Farm Green-Blue Water Management to Increase Crop Production," all his arguments in the paper go contrary to this objective.
"Climate change, population growth and changing diets will put joint pressure on the world's fresh-water resources via increased demand for the production of crop and livestock products," he writes. Discussing his institute's computer models, which exclude nuclear power, hydropower, and water desalination to produce new freshwater, he adds with pseudo-scientific precision: "This global-scale model study quantifies how much water is required to produce a balanced diet. By comparing the requirements with available blue and green water on present agricultural land per country, water scarcity can be determined in more detail compared to previous scarcity models" (emphasis added).
The conclusion is that under Gerten's 17 climate models, by 2070-99, water scarcity will increase under rising atmospheric CO2 concentration and population growth.
"Water scarcity will aggravate in many countries, and that means a number of countries are at risk of losing their capacity to be self-sufficient."
So, what happened to the positive impulse suggested by the title of his paper? Well, Dr. Gerten states: "But improved on-farm water management can significantly relax this situation: Methods to increase crop water use efficiently, such as reduction in unproductive soil evaporation and harvesting run-off water for use during dry spells, can increase crop production by up to ca. 20% globally." But then the hammer of death comes down, as he concludes: "However, adverse effects of climate change cannot be fully buffered by such management, and even if maximum efficiency increases were achieved, green-blue water resources will not be sufficient to meet the requirements for producing the specific diet for more than 9 billion people."
The real conclusion he wants to be drawn from this is that only population reduction, and decreasing the rate of economic development across the globe can "solve" the problem.
That is the message which was delivered from the highly developed Germany and Europe to the Africans who came to Stockholm to see what solutions can be adopted to solve the grave water, food, and poverty crisis!
Other such depressing cases were presented by, for example, the extremely cynical paper of Prof. Jurgen Schmandt from the Houston Advanced Research Central (U.S.A.) and Prof. Gerald North from Texas A&M University, under the title "How Sustainable Are Engineered Rivers in Arid Lands?" They argue that river engineering and dam-building and modern irrigation systems, as the case in the U.S.A. proves, are useless in the face of climate change and sedimentation! They take the case of the Rio Grande River, which they studied as proof that the storage capacity in the river's reservoirs will decrease by 6% annually, leading to massive environmental damage. Or, without adding new water resources—as the waters that can be generated by such projects as NAWAPA XXI[1]—the only thing left is to "conserve" and "shift to less water-consuming crops."
Even worse than the theory that you must dig a hole and lay down and die slowly, is that these two honored professors intend to travel around the world and spread the word, that river engineering, dam building, and modern water irrigation systems do not help. It is not clear yet, if Schmandt and North will be joined in their global tour by a preacher from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) of Texas, to garnish their scientific work with biblical citations from the Book of Revelations.
The African Perspective
Contrary to this anti-human and satanic view, the Africa Focus Day held on Aug. 28, and attended by several African water ministers, concentrated on solving the problems of food and water, in spite of the fact that Africa by itself does not have the means to accomplish this, and that many of its leaders are still suffering from the control of the British empire's institutions and agents. However, the presentations and discussions, which this reporter had the opportunity to follow closely, were held in a freshingly normal human atmosphere.
Africa's massive problems need massive investments, and need a new way of looking at the question of cooperation between North and South and East and West, different from the now-traditional policies of small handouts of aid. The African representatives, especially the African Minister's Commission on Water (AMCOW), headed by the Egyptian Water Resources and Irrigation Minister Mohammad Bahaa el-Din Saad (see interview below), presented important and realistic visions for solving Africa's problems.
Although these plans lack such important elements as the investment in science-driven technologies such as nuclear power, and large-scale transcontinental water projects such as Transaqua for refilling the Lake Chad from the Congo River waters, or transcontinental high-speed-rail networks (see review of PIDA, below), their discussions were completely opposite to those of the doomsday prophets from Europe and the U.S.A.
Whenever such serious issues as nuclear power, railway integration of Africa, creation of new water resources through water transfer, or nuclear desalination to create new water resources, were brought up in the discussion inside the conference by this reporter, or by the LaRouche movement activists outside the conference, the answer from the majority of the African and Asian participants was: "Of course!"
In one of the exhibition halls, the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) had a booth proudly presenting plans for hydropower projects, especially on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, and in Sudan. Dr. Abdulkarim Seid, an expert of the NBI's Water Resources Planning and Management Projects in Ethiopia, gave this reporter a tour of the dam and water-management projects being built in the region. He focused especially on the Ethiopian Millennium Dam which is being built on the Blue Nile near the border with Sudan.
This dam will produce 6,000 mG of electric power, making it the largest hydropower project under construction in Africa. Together with its auxiliary water management schemes, it will reduce water sedimentation in the downstream dam reservoirs, especially in Sudan. This fact was confirmed by Sudan's Federal Minister for Water Resources Seif Eldin Abdallah, who lamented the fact that Sudanese dam reservoirs are affected significantly by the sedimentation problem emerging from soil erosion in the Ethiopian highlands during the rainy seasons, which extend from August to October. He referenced the case of the massive dredging costs in the canals of Al-Jazeera Agricultural Project in Sudan, one of the most important agricultural zones in Africa, and which is threatened by this problem.
However, Dr. Seid was, like other African participants, focused on the solution. He gave the example of the Ethiopian cooperation with China to raise the level of the Roseires Dam on the Blue Nile to increase its reservoir capacity. Contrary to reports about conflicting interests among the Nile Basin states regarding the construction of new dams upstream, Sudanese President Omar Hasan Al-Bashir met with Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi in April, to express Sudan's support for the construction of the Millennium Dam in Ethiopia.
Although many of the papers by African and Asian participants in the seminars mentioned above were plagued with the greenie jargon used by the European and American participants, in an attempt to be accepted by the conference organizers, they were generally solution-oriented. For example, a paper presented by Abby Muricho Onencan from the Nile Discourse group from Uganda, under the title, "Greening the Nile Basin: The Nexus (water, energy and food), the Key to Cooperation," argued for increasing regional cooperation in the building of modern multi-purpose hydropower projects, as a self-evident fact.
Onencan wrote:
"Through the cooperative arrangements under the Nile Basin Initiative, it has become evident that broad-based water service interventions in energy utilities and irrigation services benefit everyone and play a major role in improving sustainable and dignified livelihoods. Through various designed multi-purpose projects like the joint Multi-Purpose Project, the NBI has clearly indicated that it is better to approach a project with the aim of reaping a myriad of benefits.... As water resources become scarce, water will be pumped long distances or be produced through alternative means, such as energy-intensive desalination processes. Modern water management, including establishing monitoring networks and data centers is dependent on reliable access to electricity. To achieve water security, which means the provision of an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihood, ecosystems and production, energy must be available."
No further comment is necessary.
'No' to the Oligarchy's Four Horsemen!
Africa's and the world's water, food, and energy requirements are clearly threatened, and both the cause and solution of the crisis is a shift in the view of the human race's role in nature and the universe. This also means a shift in the political-economic practices nationally and globally. If we accept the British empire's malthusian religion, then we need not do anything, as we wait for the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse to descend upon us.
Otherwise, as free men and women, belonging to sovereign nations, we should reject this oligarchical notion, and embrace instead, the Promethean, humanist vision, that we, as created in the image of a creative universal soul, are capable of being masters of our fate, not slaves under the whims of nature and the imperialist oligarchs and their hypocritical quackademics.
To translate this vision into policy for nations, regions, and continents, view the policies presented by Lyndon LaRouche and his associates (www.larouchepac.com).
