B. Mezgebu
29 August 2007
Addis Abeba — We will come to the "diamond- water paradox" in a while but let's first look at a series of less high-sounding paradoxes of water but paradoxes all the same. It has been raining in Addis for the past several months, a non-event given that it is a season for rain. Although destruction of property has occurred in some parts of the country, we have heard less of flush floods this time. So it is the usual downpours.
The contradiction is that in the midst of such plenty, several areas here in the city find themselves without water for a number of days on end. In other cases it could be that piped water is available only for few hours each day.
The other night, when torrential rains started to fall and the beatings on the roof woke me up; I stumbled out of my bed and lugged a coup of buckets, positioning them under the roof gutter. Since a few days have already passed during which the municipal water had stopped coming, two buckets full to the brim, of clean, freezing water came as a prized commodity.
Necessity is indeed the mother of invention. Not that tucking water container under the rains is anything novel, but if there were no scarcity in the house, I would not have bothered. Storage is the key here, of course. Water has to be stored somewhere, somehow, to be conveniently utilized. Storing water from rain in urban areas is worth serious investigation.
You might find the following quite astonishing. It is from the NewYorker October 23, 2006: "Water is precious but not like oil, which once burned, is gone forever. While there is almost no human activity that doesn't depend on water in some way, it never actually disappears: when water leaves one place, it simply goes somewhere else. Water that dinosaurs drank is still consumed by humans, and the amount of fresh water on earth has not changed significantly for years." One variable in the equation has surely changed though: consumers of water, mainly human beings have multiplied geometrically over the centuries. The dinosaurs no longer consume water, of course, because they got wiped out by hurtling moons. Irrigation and industry are supposed to voraciously hog water, so they are major consumers. Nevertheless, at least on a theoretical level, the fact that water remains quantitatively fixed sounds promising and gives us hope that alleviating water shortages wherever they may exist is achievable.
Many countries, notably India, started some years back to go into harvesting water from roofs in substantive ways in cities. If you can find a way around the problem of storage, roof-water harvesting could take you a long way into making water available in even rainfall deficit areas. You may have piped water alright, but utility cost being what they are today, it could be economically sensible installing the system at household level.
Roof-water harvesting in drought prone areas has been introduced in Ethiopia. So far the dominant stumbling block in their wide application has been the initial cost of installation of the reservoir or water tank. There are some technical hitches as well, although they may not be impossible to solve. But the cost issue is a major thing.
Adam Smith, in his seminal book, the "Wealth of Nations" reflecting the tradition of philosophers that had come before him, noted that although nothing substitutes water in value; nothing can be freer than it. He gave it the name of, "the diamond-water paradox". As the NewYorker magazine put it," although water is essential for life, and the value of diamonds is mostly aesthetic, the price of water has always been far lower than that of diamonds." "Economists often argue that water should be considered a commodity, like housing or food. But water possesses an intangible, even mystical quality that transcends the principle of economics; people simply don't think about it in the way that they think about transportation or clothing and they never have." That is why perhaps; not water, but the conservation of water, has always been our least of concerns. Water gushing out of faulty mains that one routinely encounters in the streets hardly is worthy of our uttering exclamation remarks. Regional water wars may or may not materialize, but wait to see this liquid morphing into gold.
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