Lots of hopeful coverage last week about the find, made by Boston University researchers, of a massive underground lake in Darfur. The Independent was pretty typical:
In the dry wasteland of Sudan’s war-racked Darfur region, the imprint of an ancient 8,000sq-mile underground lake has been discovered by geologists from Boston University. If confirmed, a lake as big as the area of Wales could replenish the region for a century. It is also raising hopes that one cause of the devastating civil war could be alleviated if drinking water is pumped to the surface.
The Egyptian geologist Farouk El-Baz, who led the research, hopes up to 1,000 deep wells would bring some relief to an area where conflict between nomadic herders and farmers has been exacerbated by climate change and dwindling water supplies.
But a thoughtful article in the New York Times yesterday argues that the find may, if confirmed, be as much a curse as a blessing. Alex de Waal is quoted as saying,
Like all resources water can be used for good or ill … If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.
Exactly right. In resource-scarce contexts, environmental goods are assets: so the key questions are ones like: who owns them? Who gets to use them? Who gets to lend them? And who gets to trade them? Unfortunately, most donor agencies these days are pretty bad at integrating these kinds of question into their development programming. But as resource scarcity takes centre stage in an increasing number of developing countries, watch this space…
