“If you want fast money and are willing to take the risk, that’s the only way to get it,” says Abdullah Dieng, a fisherman in Bissau, Guinea, in a new IRIN article, “Fishermen turn to trafficking as fish profits drop.” Fishermen in Guinea have a problem: No one is buying their fish. “The lack of decent roads into the interior of the country, combined with prohibitive fuel prices, makes it too difficult for fish-sellers to transport fish any further than Bissau, creating a saturated market,” reports IRIN. As an alternative, the fishermen are turning to illegal trade in drugs and humans. By smuggling, they can earn much more money.

“The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates several hundred kilograms of cocaine go through the country each week, while according to 2004 figures from the International Office of Migration, one million West and Central Africans head clandestinely to Europe every year,” reports IRIN.

Fisheries are collapsing all over the world, but especially in Africa. The New York Times article “Europe Takes Africa’s Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants Follow” reports that there is almost no regulation of Bissau’s fishery, like most fisheries along the African coast. “Creating the Enabling Environment for Effective Fisheries Enforcement,” an event in the Environmental Change and Security Program’s fisheries series, explored some of the challenges associated with fisheries management. One of the most basic problems is a lack of information. Vladimir Kacyznski, a marine scientist with the University of Washington, told the Times that “no one has comprehensively studied the nation’s coastal waters for at least 20 years.” As a result, both local and European fishers have mostly stripped the area of its fish.

The lack of oversight is largely due to a lack of attention, and thus a lack of money. IRIN reports that “The fishing ministry receives just 5 percent of the government’s paltry annual budget, despite fishing bringing in 40 percent of the country’s annual revenues, and most of this money can only cover staff salaries.” Without increased funding and attention, it is unlikely that a solution will emerge to the environmental and economic problems that force fishermen to turn to illegal and dangerous activities. As the source of their livelihoods disappears, they have fewer and fewer options. Said one consultant quoted in the Times story, “The sea is being emptied.”

“Women are key to the development challenge,” says Strategies for Promoting Gender Equity in Developing Countries, but “gender mainstreaming has been associated with more failures than gains.” Detailing findings from an April 2007 conference co-sponsored by the Wilson Center and the Inter-American Foundation, the report calls for a redesigned approach operating on multiple fronts. Blogging about the report, About.com’s Linda Lowen dubs the gap between women and men in developing countries a “Grand Canyon-like divide” compared to the “crack in the sidewalk” faced by Western women.

A Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder on Angola—now Africa’s leading oil producer—tackles the familiar paradox of extreme poverty in resource-rich countries. Burdened by “an opaque financial system rife with corruption,” Angola’s leaky coffers are filling up with Chinese currency. As Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos put it, “China needs natural resources, and Angola wants development.” FastCompany.com’s “Special Report: China In Africa” criticizes the overwhelming Chinese presence in Africa: “The sub-Sahara is now the scene of one of the most sweeping, bare-knuckled, and ingenious resource grabs the world has ever seen.”

In Scientific American’s “Facing the Freshwater Crisis,” Peter Rogers writes that the demands of increasing population, along with increasingly frequent droughts due to climate change, signal rough waters ahead, and calls for major infrastructure investments to prevent catastrophe. Closer to home, Circle of Blue reports on a new era of water scarcity in the United States, and director Jim Thebaut’s documentary “Running Dry: The American Southwest” takes a look at the hard-hit region.

Pastoralists are socially marginalized in many countries, making them highly vulnerable to climate change despite their well-developed ability to adapt to changing conditions, reports the International Institute for Environment and Development in “Browsing on fences: Pastoral land rights, livelihoods and adaptation to climate change.” The paper notes that the “high rate of development intervention failure” has worsened the situation, and calls for giving pastoralists “a wider range of resources, agro-ecological as well as socio-economic,” to protect them.

“Over the past two decades, the extraction and trade of natural resources have helped incite, fuel and prolong violent conflicts,” write Alec Crawford and Oli Brown in Growing Unrest: The links between farmed and fished resources and the risk of conflict, a new report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. “The links between natural resources and conflict are established and widely accepted,” point out the authors; however, “it has become ‘received wisdom’ that these linkages only apply to a certain subset of natural resources—oil, diamonds, certain minerals (e.g., coltan), illegal narcotics and timber.” This notion is mistaken, as agriculture and fisheries are also often involved in funding and instigating conflict.

The authors highlight four case studies before making general policy recommendations. In the Côte d’Ivoire, instabilities in the cocoa market during the 1980s exacerbated social tensions, eventually leading to civil war. During this war, both sides taxed cocoa transport or production to finance their war effort.

In Somalia, where limited ports make it easy to control exports, a tax on bananas was a significant source of income for many Somali warlords during the 1990s. In present-day Somalia, many warlords have turned to the fishing market, funding local militias by issuing false fishing licenses to foreign companies for millions of dollars.

The final case examines the tensions over water-sharing agreements in Central Asia between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Water necessary for irrigating cotton, the local economic staple, has been a contentious issue for years, and resolution has not been forthcoming even as irrigation infrastructure continues to decay.

Based on these case studies, the authors report three main findings:

• By controlling the trade of agricultural or marine commodities, gangs, warlords, or sovereign nations can extract wealth and use it to support conflicts and other oppressive activities.
• When the prices of farmed and fished goods are volatile, they can lead to instability and conflict in nations without stable markets or political systems.
• Agricultural and marine goods can be seen as “proxies” for more basic commodities, such as freshwater and land — and thus part of larger conflicts over those resources.

The report offers 14 recommendations — falling into two general categories — for policymakers hoping to minimize conflict over these resources. It recommends expanding existing structures – such as extending sanctions that currently punish those who use diamonds, oil, coltan, and other natural resources to fund conflict – to include agricultural and marine commodities. It also recommends stabilizing dangerous situations, such as easing institutional tensions when faced with shortages or conflicting interests, or cracking down on opportunities for exploitation caused by price volatility.

Those interested in natural resources and conflict should expand their focus to fished and farmed resources instead of remaining trapped in a worldview in which only certain commodities are important. The authors write, “It is not the type of resource that matters, but rather how it is produced and traded, to what ends the revenues are put, and what the associated impact is on people and their environments.”

ECSP examined the challenges facing the world’s fisheries in a recent meeting series available at www.wilsoncenter.org/fish. An ongoing series looks at natural resources and conflict: www.wilsoncenter.org/newhorizons.

“Corruption in the water sector puts the lives and livelihoods of billions of people at risk,” says the Global Corruption Report 2008, a new report from the Institute for Security Studies and Transparency International, warning that pervasive corruption in the water sector could have devastating consequences for economic and social development, as well as the health of ecosystems worldwide. The report urges policymakers and scholars to address the issue of corruption in the water sector in the context of broader climate change and development discussions.

News coverage of the global water crisis focuses on the familiar circumstance of too many people and not enough water. This report takes a slightly different stance, suggesting that the water crisis is actually a water governance crisis, of which corruption is a major component.

According to the report, 80 percent of health problems in the developing world can be attributed to inadequate access to clean water and sanitation. The report cites China as a particularly egregious example, noting that 90 percent of Chinese cities pull from polluted aquifers and that 75 percent of river water in urban areas is too contaminated for drinking or fishing. This situation violates Chinese environmental standards, but corruption allows polluters to circumvent legal enforcement.

International water governance is increasingly critical. Forty percent of the world’s population draws on water from international water basins. Numerous countries depend on the Nile River, from its origin in the Rift Valley to its mouth on the Mediterranean. The report finds, “where corruption disrupts the equitable sharing of water between countries and communities, it also threatens political stability and regional security.” Ken Conca’s Governing Waterdelves more deeply into the links between poor water governance and new forms of social conflict, which are summarized in a Navigating Peace research brief.


But sharing water resources can also build confidence and increase dialogue. For example, Israel and Palestine discuss the Dead Sea and the Jordan River more frequently, and more productively, than they do political rapprochement.

Water’s global nature demands a comprehensive response involving governments, inter- and nongovernmental organizations, and local institutions. The report puts forth four recommendations:

• Improve measurements of existing corruption;
• Strengthen regulatory oversight;
• Develop a more transparent public procurement process; and
• Implement transparency and participation as guiding principles for all water governance.

ECSP has long been involved in the discussion of water’s place in the international political dialogue. In “Water Wars: Obscuring Opportunities,” published in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs, Geoff Dabelko and Karin Bencala explain how transboundary water use can facilitate cooperation as readily as conflict. It would be a boon to the global community if that cooperation could be harnessed to promote stronger, more transparent water governance.

Graphic used courtesy Transparency International. All rights reserved. ©Transparency International 2008.

The authors of an article in the most recent issue of Science report that population tends to grow, not decline, around protected areas. Population growth means increased donor funding for conservation programs, they say, but high population density can negatively impact the effectiveness of such programs.

The latest volume of the journal Population and Environment, featuring contributions from former ECSP speakers Lori Hunter, Roger-Mark De Souza, and Judy Oglethorpe, examines the links between the environment and HIV/AIDS in Africa, calling for greater attention to the connections between these seemingly disparate issues.

Population growth rates and conservation are closely and inextricably linked, says a new UN Population Fund fact sheet that argues that slowing growth rates worldwide through family planning programming is a vital, and currently underfunded, component of the fight against environmental degradation.

“Countries have historically been quick to rattle their sabers over water, but they have nevertheless been content to keep them sheathed,” write ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko and ECSP Program Assistant Karin Bencala in “Water Wars: Obscuring Opportunities,” published in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs (PDF previews), which focuses on global water issues.

Mark Jenkins explores the July 2007 murders of the Virunga mountain gorillas in a piece in National Geographic. The piece is accompanied by a stunning photo slideshow by photographer Brent Stirton.

The Toronto Star takes a look at female feticide and infanticide in India, and how young women are now being trafficked from rural areas to serve as brides in areas where the gender gap is widest.

Climate change is responsible for an upswing in malaria in Kenya’s highlands, reports IPS News. “There is a clear correlation between climatic variations and malaria epidemics,” said Dr. Willis Akhwale, head of Kenya’s National Malaria Control Programme.

A New York Times article explores the causes of low birthrates in Europe—and particularly low ones in southern Europe.

The World Health Organization has released Safer water, better health, the first report to provide country-level estimates of the burden of disease caused by unsafe water and inadequate sanitation and hygiene.

For the past several months, I have been working with a team of other researchers in partnership with WaterAid and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs to find new techniques for measuring the benefits of improved water and sanitation in rural Madagascar (draft report). Studies of the impact of water and sanitation programs tend to focus on health treatment costs avoided and time saved obtaining water, but our field visits and analysis suggest that water and sanitation development projects can also improve food security, education, and local community governance, and may even introduce new forms of conflict resolution.

After our team’s initial field visit to rural communities around Ambositra, a small commercial town several hours south of the capital, we decided to broaden our scope of analysis. We had noticed that livelihoods and community management were dramatically different in villages with clean water nearby than in villages whose residents continued to walk long distances to sources of questionable quality.

By conducting focus group interviews with community organizations, community councils, and other community leaders, we discovered that the new water projects led to the creation of water committees to oversee the maintenance and long-term use of these services. As these committees gained respect and legitimacy within their communities, they encouraged and managed additional community improvement projects. For instance, one committee collected contributions and organized the construction of a community storage facility for surplus rice harvests (which also stored the tax payments for the new water system, which are often made in rice, not currency). In another village, the water committee members coordinated efforts to self-finance and build a new one-room primary school, which subsequently required the government to fund water and sanitation facilities for the school. This brought water services to an entire new section of the village in addition to the school.

The committees’ direct interaction with the users of the tap stands increased the communities’ trust in the committees, a fact reflected in statements gathered through household surveys. Several water committees organized their communities to participate in a regional economic fair, showcasing their vegetable production and arts and crafts, an opportunity that other villages did not seize.

In addition, the committees codified conflict resolution mechanisms in their founding committee rules, formalizing a crucial tool for mediating conflicts between community members over water. These committees are also empowered to resolve water-related conflicts that existed prior to the project. The water committees are evidence of the first institutions developing in these small communities. Although our report includes suggestions for measuring some of the diverse impacts of improved water and sanitation, such as education and livelihoods, further questions remain: How do we measure the impact of water and sanitation projects on governance and natural resource management? Are there ways to quantify community-level social changes?

Food security is another area that changed after the introduction of improved water sources. The close proximity of water to the houses dramatically increased the variety and quantity of vegetables grown. Our interviews revealed a dramatic upsurge in the cultivation of high-value crops that are more sensitive to rainfall variability. The reliable small-scale irrigation made possible by the water project allowed farmers to cultivate crops that had previously been off-limits to them. These new crops diversified production and decreased dependence on other foods for basic consumption, promoting better nutrition and sustainable harvests. In addition, one water committee actively sought out secondary water sources in order to ensure sufficient water flow throughout the dry season, further increasing households’ food security.

There are additional indicators that we did not have time to adequately study and quantify, including increased environmental awareness; the impact on gender dynamics and women’s earning power; the psychological impact of clean water and improved sanitation; and higher earning potential due to higher rates of school attendance and the attainment of more advanced education levels. The team hopes that additional work will be carried out on these and other potential benefits of water and sanitation projects, so that governments, donors, NGOs, and private citizens will see that these projects are not just investments in pipelines and latrines, but in food security, governance, education, economies, and conflict resolution—all of which contribute to human dignity and security.

Alex Fischer is a policy associate at WaterAid America, where he works on the management and development of water resources. He is also involved with several projects focusing on environmental governance in post-conflict settings. He holds a master of international affairs degree from Columbia University.

Photo: A water system in a village near Ambositra has multiple uses, including drinking water, small-scale irrigation, clothes washing, and composting. Courtesy of Alex Fischer.

“The geopolitics of the twenty-first century may well be the geopolitics of scarcity—of land, of food, of water, of energy,” write the authors of Environmental Change and the New Security Agenda: Implications for Canada’s security and environment, a new report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The report says current approaches to environmental issues are “short-sighted” and calls for international acknowledgement that the environment is not a “soft” security issue.

“Climate change is today one of the main drivers of forced displacement,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told The Guardian in an interview. He warned that the number of people displaced is rising dramatically and will continue to do so, and that global funding has failed to keep pace with the growing challenge. He also noted that existing legal structures to manage refugee flows are out of touch with the increasing influence of climate change.

“The world’s poorest of the poor live in the toughest areas of the planet—the drylands,” says recent ECSP speaker Masego Madzwamuse in the BBC’s latest Green Room feature. She argues that “humanitarian and food relief follow the TV headlines,” and that only sustained and concerted efforts respecting indigenous experience and wisdom will be able to ease the plight of the world’s “dryland dwellers.”

The 2008 EPD WaterAid Madagascar team at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs presented its findings in WaterAid Madagascar: Valuating Economic and Social Impacts of Improved Water and Sanitation Services. The team found that “Madagascar’s development goals could be significantly advanced by adequate water and sanitation services” and encouraged increased public awareness of the links between access to safe water and sanitation services and economic development.

The Population Council has released a new working paper, “Fertility transitions in developing countries: Progress or stagnation?” While recent declines in fertility levels in developing countries have led many to assume that the trend will continue, the paper finds that fertility rates in many countries have in fact stalled, a trend that could have long-term security implications worldwide.