By Najib Saab, Isuue 12, May-June 1998

Resolutions of some international conferences and meetings on environment and development, are almost an invitation for poor countries to perish of thirst, starvation and disease. They call for reducing water consumption and imposing high taxation on water, in countries where millions of people lack clean water supplies and where the annual water consumption per person is less than the weekly consumption of a citizen in an industrialized country. They call for restrictions on agriculture and food production operation, to save bio-diversity and soil quality, in countries where the population suffers malnutrition.

Slogans propagated by environmentalists in industrialized countries cannot be blindly adopted in poor countries where priorities might be entirely different. We cannot expect poor people striving to feed their children with the minimum, which in many cases is not available, to invest in environmental measures designed for the future. They first should have confidence that there will be a future.

It is true that water is a major global issue. The latest figures indicate that more than 1bn people, 20 per cent of the world population, suffer severe shortages in clean drinking water, and 50 per cent lack sufficient water to meet minimum sanitary and health requirements. This problem is expected to aggravate during the next 25 years, when one third of the world population will face water crises.

It is also true that millions of hectares are transformed annually into deserts due to intensive and inappropriate land use. Many species are becoming extinct with urbanization, industrial development, exploitation of forests and resources, as well as a wide variety of pressing environmental problems such as river, marine, air and soil pollution.

All these are undeniable and persistent problems requiring prompt solutions. But how can restrictions on water use and food production be imposed on thirsty and hungry people without providing alternatives? Why is consumption reduction being marketed as the only solution? While economy in the use of natural resources is vital, implemented alone it will only lead to more need and poverty, because it means sharing the decreasing available recourses by an increasing number of people. This humiliates human dignity and capabilities, and jeopardizes the rights of the poor.

International conferences are rather expected to adopt programmes to transfer and tailor technologies to beneficiary developing countries. This way, environment conservation will be achieved with due respect to developing local capabilities, and safeguarding resources will run parallel to developing new appropriate production techniques which ensure abundance.

Arab countries short in fresh water are all located on seas. Many oil-producing countries desalinate sea water via distillation or reverse osmosis processes. All desalination techniques currently used are very costly and cannot be made accessible to all. They are fully based on imported technologies developed in countries where fresh water is plenty and desalination is not needed. Why not invest huge resources in research programmes to develop cheap desalination techniques? For example, can solar energy and vast desert areas be of any use in this area? Is it possible to construct huge collecting ponds in the desert and pump water through sand to help the desalination process? Many questions are posed by scientists that need serious studies. In the Netherlands, for instance, there are successful experiments to purify water by pumping it underground through sand dunes. Rather than merely warning against the mis-use of agricultural land, serious efforts should be made, and resources invested, in research to develop appropriate means to increase food production while protecting the environment. New crop varieties can be engineered that adapt to local climate and conditions.

Could it be that scientists, capable of reproducing cells and cloning animals, are unable to develop seeds that can be planted in salt water with reasonable costs? Besides technologies oriented to high productivity on a mass scale, what efforts are made to develop local appropriate technologies to increase production and improve life quality at the personal level? Developing countries should reject the alleged equity theory based on fair distribution of their limited resources, and start to develop innovative, clean and appropriate production technologies that provide abundance. After all, equitable and fair distribution in sustainable development means sharing of abundance not partaking of poverty.