C h a p t e r 1

To Have and Have Not

I

T H A S B E E N S A I D

that if the twentieth century was the cen-

tury of oil, then the twenty-first century will be the century of

water.

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While it’s true that roughly three-quarters of the earth’s sur-

face is made up of water, all that blue space on the grade-school

globe can be deceiving: 97 percent of the world’s water is

seawater—loaded with salt and unfit for drinking. The rest is drink-

able, but two-thirds of that is locked up in the polar ice caps and

unavailable. That means less than 1 percent of all the surface water

on earth is accessible, potable freshwater.

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Every day much of world

is reminded of just what a precious resource freshwater can be.

More than a billion people—one-sixth of the world’s population—

do not have access to clean drinking water, and 2.1 million people

die annually because of unsafe drinking-water conditions.

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By 2025,

two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to face water short-

ages—the vast majority of them in the developing world. Much of

the world’s population growth is occurring in areas where water is

far from abundant. Global per capita water use has actually risen

over time: during the last seventy years, as the world’s population

has tripled, water use has increased sixfold.

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During the next one

hundred years the world will be increasingly divided into two

groups: the water “haves” and the water “have-nots,” and most of

the have-nots will be in the world’s poorest countries. “At the be-

ginning of the twenty-first Century, the Earth . . . is facing a serious

water crisis,” warned the United Nations in its 2003 report on

world water development. “All the signs suggest that it is getting

worse and will continue to do so unless corrective action is taken.”

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