Tuesday, March 10

Desalination Mirage

The following passages are from John Vidal's slambang razzledazzle February 19, 2011 report for the Guardian, What does the Arab world do when its water runs out? The report, still as fresh and important as when Vidal gathered data for it, is worth reading in its entirety, although here I'll focus on just those passages relating to desalination. 
Before launching, howevrer, I do want to mention that Vidal was covering so much ground that he couldn't drill down, if you'll pardon the expression, into every situation he outlined without making the report book length. But this means he completely omitted all the bad news related to the following practice he mentioned:
The more drastic response to the [water] crisis is to shift farming elsewhere and to build reserves. Saudi Arabia said in 2008 it would cut domestic wheat output by 12.5% a year to save its water supplies. It is now subsidising traders to buy land in Africa. 
The Saudi government sure as hell is buying up African farming land through proxies. It's called "villagization," which takes a prize for Orwellian language.  Villagization is exactly the opposite of what it sounds like; it's displacing African farmers from their villages to make way for foreign-owned agribusiness.
Saudis aren't the only ones doing this; Indian agribusiness is also engaged in villagization in Africa. This isn't even talking about China's agribusiness scooping up huge chunks of Ukrainian farmland or the Saudis having turned fertile regions in Pakistan into their plantation-- while many Pakistanis go hungry and thirsty.
Villagization is a kind of pussyfooting plantation colonialism made possible by hardscrabble governments corrupt as the day is long being bought up by the foreigners.
But it could be the scandals that started bringing villagization to public attention happened before John Vidal researched for his report.  In a later post I'll look at one of the scandals, which got so stinky it couldn't be covered up any longer. For now, and for readers who think desalination was a viable answer for chronic water shortages:
Actually desalination has allowed everyone who uses it, not just dictators and elites, to waste water on a massive scale.  It's just that elites created a big mirage in the desert out of desalination.


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