Competition for Scarce Water Supplies

In developed and developing countries alike, fierce competition among water users is rising as people demand more and more from limited water resources. Tensions are particularly severe in places that face population pressures, rapid urbanization, and urgent development needs.

A number of developed, water-short countries—including Belgium, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Singapore—have faced tensions over water. The western United States has witnessed tension between (a) farmers with irrigation needs, and (b) urban areas with municipal demands. San Diego, California is a classic case, but the city negotiated a landmark deal with vegetable growers in the Imperial Valley. The farmers now conserve water and sell the surplus to the city (Purdum, 1997).


China is already practising what many water experts call the “zero-sum game” of water management. The zero sum game—when authorities increase water supply to one user by taking it away from another—involves both competing areas and competing types of use, as when cities compete with farmers or when human needs compete with those of ecosystems. China's freshwater supplies have been estimated to be capable of supporting 650 million people sustainably—only half of the country's current population of 1.2 billion (Qu Geping, personal communication, 1993). Across northern and central China some 300 major cities, including Beijing, face critical shortages. There is simply not enough water to meet the competing needs of the country's cities, industries, and agriculture. China has depleted underground aquifers and dammed, diverted, and drained surface waters. The water table under China's capital has dropped by roughly two meters a year for the last decade. One-third of the wells dried up because the pipes no longer reach the shrinking aquifer (Brown & Halweil, 1998). As the influx of China's rural farm workers seeking urban jobs grows ever larger, Beijing's water shortages are expected to worsen. The government is planning a huge aqueduct that will ferry water from the Danjiangkou Reservoir in Henan Province to Beijing, across 1,300 kilometers of heavily farmed agricultural land—land that also needs the water for food production.

China's Yellow River is a classic case of the zero-sum game in operation. The river is so over-subscribed that, for an average of 70 days a year for the past decade, its waters have dried up before reaching the Bohai Sea. In 1995, this dry period lasted for 122 days. In May 1996, one of the few years when farming villages near the river's mouth could take water to feed their crops, the government told them not to touch a drop. Instead, all of the water went to a state-owned oil field further downstream, bypassing hundreds of parched farms and factories along a 400- kilometer stretch of the river (Tyler, 1996).