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To: Frank Pembleton who wrote (93614)	8/13/2001 7:31:41 AM
From: Frank Pembleton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95453

Canadian water on tap for future trade talks By ALANNA MITCHELL From Monday's Globe and Mail Water will become such a scarce and precious commodity in the coming years that it is set to emerge as a key issue in the next round of international trade talks, says the vice-president of the World Water Council. One of the issues to be hammered out is how much of Canada's water — and the food we grow with it — will need to be shared with other countries in the future, said William Cosgrove, who is also the Canadian organizer of the Stockholm Water Symposium, which begins Monday. "I see this as a major agenda item of future World Trade Organization talks," said Mr. Cosgrove, who worked at the World Bank for 16 years, most recently as vice-president. The symposium leads up to the third World Water Forum, which is scheduled to be held in Kyoto in March, 2003. That forum is being billed as a critical international meeting to discuss ways of dealing with the predicted water shortage. The most recent WTO talks, known as the Uruguay round, centred on the dry topic of agricultural subsidies. In fact, WTO talks have come under fire for their lack of relevance to everyday life. In 1999, protesters managed to shut down the WTO meetings in Seattle. Were the free-trade body to focus on such a controversial topic as the sharing of food and water, it would likely come under even more intense scrutiny. The next scheduled meeting of the WTO is in Doha, Qatar, in November. No official agenda has been set, said Oussamah Tamim, a spokesman for Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. It is not clear whether the Qatar meeting will launch a new round of talks, or what the focus of those might be. Mr. Cosgrove said that water scarcity will become a pressing issue in the next few years. By 2025, about 2.7 billion people — about one-third of the world's population then — will face a severe shortage of water, according to research conducted for the world water forums. Today, about 450 million people, or 7 per cent of the global population, are in that precarious situation. Regions facing water shortages will include parts of southern Europe, North and South America — especially the western United States — North Africa, the Middle East, parts of India and China, and most of sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the world's major river systems are expected to dry up, unless trends can be reversed, and even large cities will be seriously short of water. While water is a necessity of human life, it is also needed for crops. Food, in fact, is considered a movable form of water in trade circles. Canada is one of the few countries that has plentiful water supplies and the ability to turn them into food, which is why it will inevitably have a large stake in any talks about water. Some of these supplies, particularly in Saskatchewan and northern Alberta, are expected to disappear as climate change alters precipitation patterns. But most will remain intact, potentially putting Canada in a position of power — or making it vulnerable to foreign power plays. "What Canada needs to do is have a water strategy," Mr. Cosgrove said. "Increasingly, the rest of the world will be looking at us to help feed them." The urgent task of the past century was to figure out how to grow enough food to feed a rapidly increasing human population. Irrigation became a focus of international policy. Dams, designed to control water flows and feed crops, were built as never before. And it worked. Between 1960 and 1997, the world's supply of calories per person per day rose by 23 per cent. Now, though, this level of irrigation is causing damage to many of the world's water systems. The crunch centres on the fact that agricultural experts forecast that irrigation and other food-growing uses for water must rise by between 15 per cent and 20 per cent in the next quarter-century to keep up with the increasing demand for food. Environmental scientists insist that the use of water must drop — perhaps by as much as 10 per cent globally over the next 25 years — to protect the water systems that sustain life for millions of people. The Stockholm symposium, and later the World Water Forum in Kyoto, are meant to debate these issues and, hopefully, find solutions that will be in the best interests of the world as a whole. globeandmail.com