THE LOOMING WAR OVER WATER

By Henrylito D. Tacio
After signing the historic accord in 1979 that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, President Anwar Sadat commented: “The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water.”
“The world has got a very big water problem,” says Sir Crispin Tickell, former British ambassador to the United Nations and one of the organizers of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.  “It will be the progenitor of more wars than oil.”
Humans use an enormous amount of water.  “We dam rivers, pump groundwater, and siphon lakes and rivers to grow our food, quench our thirst, spur our industry,” writes Jerome Casagrande, director of Environmental Innovations Initiative. 
“We use our rivers, lakes, and oceans intentionally and unintentionally as dumping grounds for our waste.  We fell the forests and pave the land, reducing the soil’s ability to retain water – so more water flows to the sea and become unavailable for irrigation, industrial use or drinking, not to mention unavailable to the plants and animals with whom we share the land,” Casagrande adds.
“Water is the most precious asset on Earth,” points out Dr. Sandra Postel, director of the Massachusetts-based Global Water Policy Project.  “It is the basis of life.” 
Next to air, water is the element most necessary for survival. Water makes up more than 60 percent of your body weight.  Proteins make up only 18 percent while fats encompass 15 percent, minerals 4 percent, carbohydrates 2 percent, and vitamins less than one percent.
Your brain contains 74 percent water, blood contains 83 percent water, lean muscle has 75 percent water, and bone has 22 percent water.  A lack of water affects everything from your digestive tract to your immune system.  It also helps regulate your body temperature.
If you are short serving yourself on water, you’re making yourself sick.  In his book, Your Body’s Many Cries for Water, Dr. F. Batmanghelidj proposes a paradigm-shifting theory: Chronic, unintentional dehydration is the root of many of your serious maladies, including asthma, arthritis, lower back pain, and hypertension.
“Your body maintains its fluid volume by a system of electrolytic mineral exchange in and out of your body’s cells,” explains Dr. Julian Whitaker, an American medical author with extensive experience in the fields of preventive medicine and natural healing.  “The mineral central to this is sodium.  When water volume is suboptimal, the kidneys reabsorb more sodium, which is followed by a rise in fluid levels in the body.  Because adequate hydration is so important, the body is remarkably efficient at maintaining water balance.”
What happens when you drink less water frequently?  “If fluid losses are too great or water intake chronically deficient,” Dr. Whitaker points out, “your body makes adjustments to maintain fluid and blood flow to the areas most crucial for life.  Blood is shunted from less essential tissues in the peripheral areas so that the brain, heart, and other vital organs continue to receive enough to meet their basic needs.”
The editors of Super Life, Super Health contend our busy body loses 10 to 12 cups of water every day just from all the normal things we do.  When we sweat, urinate, excrete waste, or even just breathe, we’re getting rid of some of the moisture.  We also lose extra water under special circumstances, such as fever, diarrhea, kidney disease, or diabetes.
The bad news is: the Philippines is facing a water shortage.  Columnist Peter Wallace contends, “A population of 170 million, a short 30 years from now, will need around 34,000 million liters per day. Metro Manila’s around 12.5 million residents need about 2,500 million liters of water per day.”
When there is a shortage of water, the Jekyll-and-Hyde paradox comes alive: from giving life, water turns into a “killing machine.”  “I understood when I was just a child that without water, everything dies,” Marq de Villiers once observed.
“Children, especially those below three years old, are more vulnerable and susceptible to diseases caused by disasters like flooding and water shortage,” explains Dr. Marinus Gotink, UNICEF’s chief of the health and nutrition division.
In 24 provinces, one of every five residents quaffs water from dubious sources, the Philippine Human Development Report points out. These provinces are: Sulu, Maguindanao, Tawi-Tawi, Basilan, Masbate, Zamboanga del Norte and Sur,  Negros Oriental and Occidental, Sultan Kudarat,  Palawan, Camarines Norte, Leyte, Misamis Occidental, Apayao, Quezon, North Cotabato,  Bukidnon, Iloilo, Guimaras, Agusan del Sur,  Nueva  Vizcaya,  Ilocos  Norte, and Benguet.
Today’s “crisis in water and sanitation is – above all – a crisis of the poor,” says the United Nations Development Program study, Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Water Crisis. In Tawi-Tawi province, 82 out of every 100 residents lack safe water. (Compare that with three in Bataan province and 39 in Capiz.)  It is obscene “if people cannot drink water without courting disease or death,” says Postel, who wrote The Last Oasis.
“You cannot wash filthy water,” the Arab proverb says.  According to the government’s monitoring data, just over 36 percent of the river systems in the Philippines are classified as sources of public water supply.  Up to 58 percent of groundwater sampled is contaminated with coliform and needs treatment.  Approximately 31 percent of illnesses monitored for a five-year period were also caused by water-borne sources, and many areas are experiencing a shortage of water supply, during the dry season.
“Water, water everywhere,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “but not a drop to drink.”
Only 2.5 percent of the water that covers over 70 percent of the earth’s surface is considered fresh water.  And only 1.3 percent is available for human use since most of the freshwater are trapped in glaciers, ice sheets, and mountainous areas.  Fresh water is drawn either from wells (tapping underground sources called aquifers) or from surface flows (like lakes, rivers, and man-made reservoirs). 
“Whiskey’s for drinkin’,” Mark Twain once wrote.  “But water is for fightin’ over.”