Water as a Source of International Conflict

From Canada to Mexico, from Africa to the Middle East, from Asia to Europe, conflicts and the potential for conflicts are growing over the availability of water. While sharing water resources has long been divisive, today's rising environmental, social, and financial costs of managing Earth's most abundant and renewable natural resource exacerbate these perennial tensions. Easing such tensions becomes imperative at a time when demands for water are rising. The greater efficiencies achievable by integrated resource management, developing water markets, and price incentives may prove the best ways to achieve this end.

The Roots of Conflict

Several factors underlie virtually all international conflicts over water and pose problems for managing and allocating it efficiently and equitably. These include the variability and uncertainty of supplies, the interdependencies among users, and the increasing scarcity and rising costs of freshwater. Because water is a "fugitive" resource—naturally flowing from one location and one state (liquid, gas, or solid) to another—individuals and countries have incentives to capture and use the resource before it moves beyond their control but little, if any, incentive to conserve and protect supplies for downstream users.

Also at the root of conflict, however, are other human elements: the vulnerability of water quality and aquatic ecosystems to human activities, the failure to treat water as an economic resource, the desire for food security and self-sufficiency in arid and semiarid regions of the world, and the importance of water to public health and economic development.

These human factors are making conflicts over water resources within countries increasingly common. When water is shared by two or more countries, the obstacles to achieving efficient, equitable, and conflict-free management are even greater. Such are the situations—described later in this article—between India and its neighbors Pakistan and Bangladesh and among most of the nations of the Middle East.

Efficiency vs. Equity

From the standpoint of integrated resource management, these human factors contribute to the inefficient division of an otherwise natural hydrological unit. Efficient management techniques require treating all the water in a given river basin, aquifer, or watershed as a unitary resource: overcoming the tendency among neighbors to exploit water unilaterally would provide a cost-effective way to increase freshwater supplies. The institutional obstacles to achieving this, though, can be considerable.

Even within the United States, multistate water laws, independent water management systems, and institutional inertia impede the introduction of more efficient management systems. Greater obstacles to integrated regional water management are likely when different countries and cultures, and even historical animosities, are involved. Consequently, achieving a sense of equity, perhaps through formalizations of historic patterns of use, among all parties may be a more realistic short-term goal than efficiency in settling international disputes.

Ultimate Market Efficiency

Water will surely become increasingly scarce, however, (see the sidebar on this page), and questions of efficiency ultimately should grow to assume greater significance in resolving conflicts. Developing markets and market-based prices allows the peaceful transfer of most resources among countries.

Under some very restrictive conditions, markets lead to an efficient distribution and use of a resource: under a wide range of conditions, the market process contributes to a more efficient allocation and management of these resources. Markets can provide individual people as well as countries with increased opportunities and incentives to develop, transfer, and use a resource in ways that would benefit all parties.

Two conditions must be satisfied for the development of efficient markets. There must be well-defined and transferable property rights in the resource being transferred, and the buyers and sellers must bear the full benefits and costs of the transfer. Both conditions are now commonly violated for water resources. The fugitive nature of the resource makes it difficult to establish clear property rights, and the interdependencies among users might cause externalities or third-party impacts when the use or location of the water is changed.

Once and Future Water Shortages

Are water supplies, whether considered globally or regionally, sufficient to our needs? Shifts in population (including increased urbanization) and in industrial and economic growth and development can increase both demands on, as well as contamination of, water supplies. In the developing nations, these factors are especially acute and are exacerbated by projected population growth: by 2000, nearly 900 million people (by U.N. figures) will likely be in regions where adequate basic drinking water and sanitation services are already strained, insufficient, or altogether lacking.

In most developed nations, there is a sound basis for the belief that supplies can meet demands. Demands, however, for water for environmental uses—wildlife, fisheries, and recreation—are increasing, and agricultural uses (irrigation demands are particularly heavy in the United States) and contamination continue to be problems.

The unknown factor of possible climate changes may be waiting in the wings for all nations. Water supplies may theoretically increase or decrease across regions under global warming, and present-day uncertainty over where and when these changes might occur makes calculating for climate change a task for the future.

Rivers and lakes that border multiple countries, rivers that flow from one country to another, and aquifers that underlie more than one country are international resources: the use of the resource by one country affects the quantity or quality of the resource available to another country. Such situations are numerous: about 200 river basins are shared by two or more countries. Thirteen are shared by five or more countries, and four basins—the Congo, Danube, Nile, and Niger—are shared by nine or more countries. Shared watersheds comprise about 47 percent of the global land area and more than 60 percent of the area on the continents of Africa, Asia, and South America. (Groundwater resources are also frequently shared by two or more countries.) The table on page 11 further illustrates some of these interdependencies.

The Middle East

The competition for water in the Middle East is so intense that lasting peace in the region is unlikely in the absence of an agreement over shared water use. Indeed, negotiations over water have a separate role in the ongoing peace talks between Israel and its neighbors. Outstanding issues and potential sources of conflict include the allocation and control of the Jordan River, the use of the aquifers underlying the West Bank, and Jordanian objections to the construction and operation of Syrian dams on the Yarmuk, the major tributary of the Jordan River. Water has already been the source of armed conflict in the region between Syria and Israel, once in the 1950s and again in the 1960s.

Several times over the past thirty years, disputes among Turkey, Syria, and Iraq over the development and use of the Euphrates River have nearly ended in armed conflict. Disputes arose in the 1960s when Turkey, where 90 percent of the water originates, and Syria started to plan large-scale withdrawals for irrigation. The conflicts heated up in 1974 when Iraq threatened to bomb the dam at Tabqa, Syria, and massed troops along the border because of the reduced flows they were receiving in the Euphrates. The threats were renewed in the spring of 1975. With the completion of the Ataturk Dam in January 1990, Turkey is in a pivotal position to influence the downstream flow of the river. Potentially, the dam could benefit all countries within the basin by reducing the variability of the river's natural flows. But the dam gives Turkey a potential water weapon that could be used against the downstream countries. The Ataturk Dam and related water projects could reduce flows as much as 40 percent to Syria and 80 percent to Iraq. The threat of reduced water flows has been used in an attempt to force Syria to withdraw support of the Kurdish rebels operating in southern Turkey. Border security and water sharing have been linked in recent negotiations between the two countries.

The Indian subcontinent

When the Indian subcontinent was partitioned between India and Pakistan in 1947, longstanding conflicts over the Indus River became overnight an international issue between two hostile countries. The partitioning divided the basin physically and split an established irrigation system between the two countries without specifying how the waters were to be divided. India was left with control of the waters supplying Pakistan's irrigation canals, and in 1948 India diverted those waters away from Pakistan. Although the canals were later reopened, the dispute threatened to lead to war. With help from the World Bank, negotiations over water issues between the two countries began in 1952. Concerns over sovereignty stymied the bank's attempts to develop and manage the basin as a unitary system for the mutual advantage of both countries. The Indus was divided between the two countries, with India receiving the three eastern and Pakistan the three western tributaries. This division deprived Pakistan of the original source of water for its irrigation system. In compensation, India paid for new canals to bring water from the rivers allocated to Pakistan and a consortium of countries financed the construction of storage dams to ensure Pakistan a reliable supply. At a price, the treaty defused a major source of potential conflict and allowed each country to develop its share of the basin's waters.

Bangladesh, which gained its independence from Pakistan twenty-five years ago with the aid of India's army, is now threatening to cancel its Treaty of Friendship with its former liberator because of conflicts over water. Most of Bangladesh's rivers flow from India, which has shown little concern about the impacts of its water developments on its downstream neighbor. A major diversion from the Ganges River just a few miles from the Bangladesh border has increased salinity levels and reduced water supplies in the Padma River (as the Ganges is known in Bangladesh), threatening the livelihood of millions of Bangladeshis.

The lack of clear property rights to international water resources is an obstacle to more efficient resource management and to the resolution of water conflicts. Two extreme and opposing doctrines have been proposed for establishing property rights over international waters. The doctrine of unlimited territorial sovereignty states that a country has exclusive rights to the use of waters within its territory This doctrine, which allows a country to deplete and pollute with no obligation to compensate adversely affected parties, was asserted by the U.S. Attorney General in 1895 in rejecting Mexico's claims to waters originating in the United States. Although the United States subsequently modified its stance on shared waters, this view characterizes India's approach for development of the Ganges River.

The contrasting doctrine of unlimited territorial integrity states that one country cannot alter the quantity and quality of water available to another. This doctrine, which greatly constrains how the upstream country can use the resource, is reflected in Egypt's threats against countries proposing water development projects that would reduce the waters of the Nile reaching Egypt.

In the absence of bargaining, both of these doctrines are likely to lead to inefficient outcomes. Under the first doctrine India has no incentive to mitigate the impacts on Bangladesh regardless of the relative magnitude of the damages imposed and the costs of abatement. On the other hand, under the second doctrine upstream countries on the Nile risk the wrath of a more powerful downstream neighbor unless they forego potentially profitable development projects regardless of how high the costs of mitigation and how small the impacts.

In practice, international water disputes generally have moved away from the extreme positions implied by these two doctrines and toward a doctrine of equitable and reasonable use. Although this narrows the likely range of disagreement, it does not provide clear property rights. In the absence of enforceable property rights, the strongest, most clever, and most advantageously positioned countries can claim and use the resource with little concern for the impacts on others. Opportunities for coordinated management may be lost in the acrimony over rights to the resource and obligations to mitigate any adverse impacts imposed on others.

Inefficient management of and conflicts over international water resources reflect problems in the management and allocation of water resources within individual countries. Individual water rights might be limited or poorly defined, constraining the ability to transfer water among competing users and uses in response to changing conditions. Water prices commonly reflect only a small fraction of the social costs associated with use, reducing incentives to conserve and protect the resource. The institutions controlling water use are often rooted in a "pre-scarcity" era when transfers were viewed as unnecessary or unimportant. Similarly, cultural and religious considerations may result in water being viewed as too important or too sacred to have its use determined by the impersonal outcome of markets.

Equity considerations and historical use have been more important than efficiency in the management of both domestic and internationally shared water resources. Relatively few precedents demonstrate the potential advantages of efficient integrated management of an entire hydrologic unit. Yet, as water becomes increasingly scarce, the potential benefits of integrated management—and of institutions that enable scarce resources to be transferred among competing uses in response to changing conditions—will grow. Institutions that perpetuate inefficient water use will become increasingly costly and unstable. Inflexible and inefficient international agreements, which must be self-enforcing, may not be sustainable.

Conclusion

Much of the world's most accessible freshwater supplies are located within basins and aquifers that cross international borders. Inflexible, inefficient, and often inequitable agreements for managing international waters contribute to rising water costs, growing concerns over the adequacy of supplies, and potential conflicts. More flexible allocation mechanisms and efficient management practices are critical for avoiding future conflicts over international supplies and curbing the rise in water costs. Introducing markets and market-based prices, which provide peaceful transfer of other resources among countries, might help promote a more efficient and flexible allocation of water resources located in international basins.