“I’m an optimist,” said Peter McCornick, director for water policy at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute, about the future of food and water security in the Ganges and Mekong river basins at the World Wildlife Fund’s recent two-day symposium on water and climate change (video). Although the basins are under threat not only from climate change, but also urbanization, industrialization, development, and population growth, he maintained there are solutions, “as long as we understand what is going on.”

At an American University event on his new book, Climate Change and Armed Conflict: Hot and Cold Wars, the Center for Teaching Excellence’s James Lee identified some plausible scenarios that the international community will have to face to adequately and peacefully address the security impacts of climate change.

The lecture was only a few hours away. In desperation, I turned to Facebook. “I’ve got just 50 minutes with the cadets at West Point today to talk water, conflict, and cooperation. What are the most compelling examples you would use to make both hard security and human security points, both threat and opportunity points? I ask in part because it is proving harder to decide what to leave out than what to put in!”

The global recession has “been very hard on journalists,” explained Andrea Crossan, radio producer for BBC’s “The World”. “With these kinds of cutbacks, you really feel it when it comes to foreign coverage.” Along with Stephanie Hanson, associate director and coordinating editor of CFR.org, and Margaret McElligott, senior producer for washingtonpost.com, Crossan spoke about the International Reporting Project’s (IRP) Gatekeeper trip to Kenya at a Wilson Center event sponsored by the Environmental Change and Security Program.

“You’ve seen a lot of areas of the world that just aren’t getting the coverage these places deserve, and Africa is one of those places,” said Crossan, partly due to the expense of travel, security, and satellite equipment. IRP, a project of The Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, aims to fill gaps in foreign reporting left by extensive budget cuts by offering U.S.-based editors and journalists opportunities to report on international stories.

“I’ve traveled a fair amount with the BBC, and I’ve seen some really difficult living conditions for people. I’ve never seen anything like I’ve seen in Kibera,” said Crossan. “We can look at all of the things we are talking about today”—environment, health, security—“through what’s happening in Kibera.”

Poverty and Pirates

At a meeting at the University of Nairobi, a student criticized foreign reporting of Kenya, saying that it “only seems to cover poverty and pirates,” said Crossan. That’s a slight improvement over previous years, when U.S. coverage focused on “witches and war,” noted an audience member.

McElligott, who previously worked for AllAfrica.com, agreed that U.S. media coverage of Africa is becoming richer, with fewer instances of racism accompanying reporting. “The world is so much smaller now,” with email, Facebook, blogs, and video providing additional venues and in-country contacts, she said.

The Kenyan press is the “most trusted institution” in the country, said Hanson. They expose corruption, report on health issues, and call the government to task. With the decline in U.S. journalists posted abroad, the support and stories provided by Kenyan reporters is crucial to getting coverage in the international media.

While pitching international stories to U.S. audiences might be a hard sell, “if it’s a good, compelling story, it will go up in a prominent place” with or without a U.S. angle, said McElligott. “It’s just about telling human stories,” said Crossan.

Kenya on the Edge: Drought and Conflict

“In the last months we’ve seen the food crisis grow in Kenya,” said McElligott. On the group’s visit to Laikipia, she noted the impacts of soil degradation, unsustainable water extraction from rivers, and the lack of governmental regulation. Lack of land and water is forcing pastoralists to travel miles away from home in order to feed cattle and goats.

“We’re desperate for water here,” said Laikipia resident Niyok Npanyaki in an IRP video report. “We’ve decided that if water is cut off, we’ll go to the water source on Mount Kenya, even if the government doesn’t let us. Otherwise we will die. People don’t start wars for no reason. If I am hungry, but if you have food, I’ll come to you and find it.”

“Loss of natural resources puts people under extreme pressure and people will go to extreme lengths in order to get those fundamentally important natural resources,” says Dr. Anthony King, director of Laikipia Wildlife Forum, in the video. Adding to the tension between farmers and pastoralists is the easy access to firearms in the Horn of Africa. “Almost every pastoralist will have an automatic weapon,” says King.

The IRP fellows visited the headquarters of the UN Environment Programme in Nairobi, but found it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of UNEP at addressing Kenya’s drought and deforestation. According to Crossan, UNEP has invested in a number of local programs, but the UNEP officials they spoke with seemed frustrated that the Kenyan government was not more involved in tackling the country’s environmental problems.

“Something I struggle with in my own work is trying to understand what actual effect these large multilateral agencies have on the ground. What is the World Bank actually doing in Ghana? What are they actually doing in Kenya?” said Hanson. “Does the money get distributed? Who does it go to? Having more Kenyans or Ghanaians who could report on these things and look into them in terms of transparency and accountability would be incredibly helpful.”

Malaria: A Disease of the Poor

“Malaria was, to be honest, not a disease that was really on my radar,” said Hanson. “I had, in a way, discounted its importance to what has happened on the continent.” At a children’s critical care unit in Nyanza Province, one of the poorest areas in Kenya with one of the highest rates of HIV and malaria, she saw beds filled with sick children. “This was shocking to me.”

When a family member is stricken with malaria, the burden of care is typically falls upon the mother, who often must travel long distances to the nearest hospital—“some of them had walked hours with a sick child,” said Hanson—leaving their other children at home and farms largely untended.

“When these women have to leave their farms to come to the clinic, they’re losing work days on the farm,” said Hanson. “That just means that their farms are less productive. They have less money to send their children to school, give their children medical care, and feed their children.”

“These macro-political issues—disputed elections, post-election violence—are actually connected to daily issues like malaria infections, hospital capacity rates, agricultural yields, and without a government that can address those things it is very difficult to see how a place like Kenya can move forward,” concluded Hanson.

Drafted by Sajid Anwar and Meaghan Parker.
Edited by Meaghan Parker.

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This week Sweden, the current holder of the European Union Presidency, will convene a conference for EU member states on environment, climate change, and security. The Ministry of Defence and the Swedish Defence Research Agency are serving as organizers, yet they are constructing the conference in broad and inclusive terms. The objective is to highlight and address the links between climate change and security in the “broadest sense of the term.” This framing is perhaps less surprising when one remembers the Swedes have been leaders in both lightening the military’s environmental bootprint and supporting international development through the Swedish International Development Agency’s investments in water, development, and peace. Right now it is the European Union, the UK, the Germans, the Finns, and the Danes joining the Swedes to drive policy action on climate and security links.

Climate change is “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century,” says the final report of a year-long commission held by The Lancet and University College London. A Lancet editorial, “Sexual and reproductive health and climate change,” says that rapid population growth “increases the scale of vulnerability to the consequences of climate change” and that meeting the unmet need for contraception “could slow high rates of population growth, thereby reducing demographic pressure on the environment.”

“Water shortages,” warns South Asia scholar Anatol Lieven, “present the greatest future threat to the viability of Pakistan as a state and a society.

This warning may be overstated, but Pakistan’s water situation is deeply troubling, as described in a new report from the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program, Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis.

Water availability has plummeted from about 5,000 m3 per capita in the early 1950s to less than 1,500 m3 per capita today. As Simi Kamal reports in the first chapter of Running on Empty, Pakistan is expected to become “water-scarce” (below 1,000 m3 per capita) by 2035—though some experts project this could happen in 2020, if not earlier.

In an unstable nation like Pakistan, water shortages can easily become security threats. In April 2009, alarm bells sounded when the Taliban pushed southeast of Swat into the Buner district of the Northwest Frontier Province. Not only is Buner close to Islamabad, it lies just 60 kilometers from the prized Tarbela Dam, which provides Pakistan with billions of cubic meters of precious water for irrigation each year.

Soaked, Salty, Dirty, and Dry

According to Kamal, Pakistan faces significant and widespread water challenges:

• Inefficient irrigation.
• Abysmal urban sanitation.
• Catastrophic environmental degradation.
• Lack of water laws to define water rights.
• Lack of a sound policy on large dams.

An arid country dependent on agriculture, Pakistan allocates more than 90 percent of its water resources to irrigation and other agricultural needs. Unfortunately, intensive irrigation and poor drainage practices have waterlogged and salinized the soil.

Women and Water in Rural Pakistan

Rural women and small farmers are particularly affected by Pakistan’s water crisis. Women bear the primary responsibility for obtaining water, but have been traditionally been shut out of government water-planning and decision-making processes. However, government and media initiatives, described by Sarah Halvorson in Running on Empty’s chapter on water and gender, are increasingly highlighting the importance of women’s participation.

Meanwhile, Adrien Couton reports that Islamabad’s water projects mainly benefit large and wealthy farmers—even though Pakistan has approximately four million farms smaller than two hectares.

Pakistan’s Thirsty Cities

With most of Pakistan’s water dedicated to agriculture, less than 10 percent is left for drinking water and sanitation. A quarter of Pakistanis lack access to safe drinking water—and many of them reside in the country’s teeming cities.

Worse, the drinking water that does exist is quickly disappearing. Lahore, which relies on groundwater, faces water table declines of up to 65 feet, as described by Anita Chaudhry and Rabia M. Chaudhry in their chapter on the city.

The scarcity of clean water in the cities—exacerbated by a lack of wastewater treatment—is a leading cause of deadly epidemics. At least 30,000 Karachiites (of whom 20,000 are children) perish each year from unsafe water.

Pakistan Must Act Now To Solve the Water Crisis

Pakistan arguably has the technological and financial resources to provide clean water. So what’s the hold-up? In her chapter on public health, Samia Altaf argues that the problem is the absence of a strong political lobby to advocate for water—and that no one holds Islamabad accountable for fixing the problem.

The report offers more recommendations for addressing Pakistan’s water:

• Invest in existing infrastructure and in modest, indigenous technology.
• Strike appropriate balances between centralized and decentralized management.
• Devote more attention to water allocation and distribution on local/individual levels.
• Understand the links between agricultural and urban water pressures.
• Embrace the role of the private sector.
• Conserve by favoring water-saving technology; less water-intensive crops; and water-conserving urban building design.
• Address structural obstacles like systemic inequality and gender discrimination.
• Take immediate action. Tremendous population growth and rapidly melting glaciers in the Himalayas ensure that the crisis will deepen before it eases.

The need for immediate action cannot be overstated. While Pakistan’s water crisis may not threaten its viability, it is undeniable that so long as the crisis rages on, essential components of the nation—such as the vital agricultural economy, the health of the population, and political and economic stability—lie very much in the balance.

Michael Kugelman is the Wilson Center’s South Asia specialist. He is co-editor, with Robert M. Hathaway, of the recently published Wilson Center book Running on Empty: Pakistan’s Water Crisis, on which this post is based. Much of his work has focused on resource shortages in Pakistan and India.

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Written by Michael Kugelman and originally published in Dawn.

Last May, while Pakistan’s military was waging its offensive in Swat, Islamabad officials were simultaneously launching another offensive in the Gulf: a charm offensive to secure investment in Pakistani farmland.

Appearing at “farmland road shows” across the region, the investment ministry representatives depicted Pakistan’s soil as the perfect solution to the Gulf nations’ food insecurity.

Such efforts have paid off for Islamabad (and according to media reports, more shows have been staged in recent days). Pakistan’s farmland is an increasingly popular target for wealthy, food-importing nations who, because of the volatility of world food markets, are taking food security matters into their own hands. These states (and also private investors) aim to buy or lease farmland overseas, grow their own crops and export them back home.

Given their lack of transparency, the details surrounding these investments are sketchy and the facts elusive. In Pakistan, uncertainty reigns over the exact amount of land made available to investors, the quantum of land sold or leased so far, and who is in fact doing the investing.

Still, even without these details, there is strong evidence to suggest that the race for Pakistan’s farmland — if not halted prematurely by farmers’ opposition or investor change-of-hearts — could trigger droves of land deals, acute resource shortages and even political strife.

Islamabad has established an extraordinarily welcoming investment environment that financiers will find hard to resist. The government’s Corporate Agriculture Farming (CAF) policy — spelled out on the Board of Investment’s website — effectively legalizes foreign land acquisitions. It permits state land to be purchased outright or leased for 50 years, and allows investors to determine the size of their acquisitions (with no upper ceiling). These features apply to a broad range of agriculture from crops, fruits and vegetables to forestry and livestock farming.

Land investors flock to countries with strong legal protections. Cambodia’s government has reportedly established a national land concession authorizing public land to be allocated to foreigners — and the country is now experiencing what the BBC describes as an “epidemic of land-grabbing.” Conversely, in India, foreign companies are banned from owning farmland — and considerably fewer investors have come calling.

Pakistan, like Cambodia, provides the legal cover farmland investors look for. However, the CAF goes beyond legal protections. It also offers generous financial incentives such as 100 per cent foreign equity; exemptions on land transfer duties; and customs-duty-free, sales-tax-free agricultural machinery imports.

Legal protection and financial incentives — what more could a foreign land investor in Pakistan want? Security, of course, and Islamabad purports to have this covered as well, through the formation of a 100,000-strong security unit. Pakistan’s government is so serious about concluding land deals that it has offered to deploy a force almost a fifth the size of the army to protect investors’ new holdings.

A rash of foreign land acquisitions in Pakistan would deepen the country’s resource crisis. Pakistan already suffers widespread water shortages, and could be water-scarce by 2020. However, supplies could dry up much sooner if enormous quantities of water are siphoned off to support large-scale, water-intensive agricultural production schemes.

To understand the scale of Pakistan’s water shortages, take a look at Aquastat, the FAO’s water statistics database. Of all the nations most often associated with relinquishing farmland, only one — Kenya — has less water availability per capita than Pakistan’s 1400 cubic meters. In fact, of the nearly 200 countries listed in the database, only 35 have less water than Pakistan — many of them the parched countries of the Gulf that are seeking the water-laden farmland they lack at home.

Indeed, quests for overseas farmland are water hunts as much as they are land hunts. Yet investors are seemingly so seduced by Islamabad’s legal and financial inducements that they disregard the fact that Pakistan’s water supply can barely sustain its own farming, much less that of immense foreign agribusiness projects.

Pakistan’s water and energy shortages could also limit the possible benefits accruing from the deals, including better technology, more employment and higher crop yields. With limited energy to operate upgraded farm machinery, and limited water to irrigate cropland, farming job prospects could suffer and talk of increased yields could become irrelevant.

Land deals could mean not just compromised small-holder livelihoods but also widespread displacement. Not surprisingly, critics argue that big land acquisitions could spark violent responses and mass political unrest. Such predictions may be premature — other than in Madagascar, opposition has been relatively localized — but they are not far-fetched in Pakistan.

Here’s why. According to the World Food Program, 77 million Pakistanis are already food-insecure, and many of them live in the country’s most volatile areas. Foreign land holdings could cause a flare-up of this food vulnerability powder keg at the worst possible time. During the height of last year’s global food crisis, Pakistan imposed export bans to keep domestic food prices down.
According to a report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, the UAE — which hopes to grow rice and wheat in Pakistan — then requested blanket exemptions from these bans.

Islamabad eventually relaxed export restrictions on Basmati rice. So a politically explosive scenario — such as the UAE trucking rice out of a drought-stricken or war-ravaged Pakistan and exporting it back to the Gulf while hungry locals look on — is not at all unrealistic. Throw that investment-protecting security force into the mix, and things could get really ugly.

Furthermore, there are long-standing rifts between Pakistan’s rural poor and its wealthy, landholding elite. Scores of huge land acquisitions — particularly if they displace poor laborers — would exacerbate these class-based cleavages.

Ominously, the Taliban’s actions in Swat reveal a new ability to exploit class divisions by pitting landless farmers against their landlords. Militants may well use farmland acquisitions as a pretext for fomenting a fresh class revolt in Punjab, the fertile, populous province coveted by the Taliban and reportedly ground zero for the farms race in Pakistan. Such a thought is enough to make one wonder if those farmland road shows are really worth the effort.

Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Bottom photo: CARE food aid in Pakistan. Courtesy flickr user Feinstein International Center.

Top photo: Gilgit, Pakistan. Courtesy flickr user michaelnewport.

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