Lurainpenny: Pacific Island Nation of T... Pacific nation may exhaust water supply by Tuesday. The small Pacific island nation of Tuvalu has declared a state of emergency because of a shortage of rain and says it may run out of water by Tuesday. Tataua Pefe, the secretary-general of Tuvalu’s Red Cross, said that because of the lack of rainfall, residents would likely "be finishing up their rationed water," according to an interview with Radio Australia. New Zealand's Foreign Minister Murray McCully said his country was rushing to help as best it could, sending in defense force personnel to help with the crisis as well as delivering Red Cross supplies. “Tuvalu has declared a state of emergency relating to water shortages in the capital, Funafuti, and a number of outer islands,” McCully said in a statement on the New Zealand Foreign Ministry site.
“Two Ministry of Foreign Affairs staff on board, including our Wellington-based High Commissioner, will remain in Tuvalu to help assess needs on the ground. " "We need emergency support," Pefe said. The Paradox of Water. By James G. Workman IBM recently made the case for harnessing human ingenuity to help conserve the Great Lakes. And Bayer HealthCare just boasted about new proprietary system that saves 20,000 gallons per day. But both companies miss something big: without the right political foundation, such new technology may drive us to use more water and energy.
This paradox emerged in 1865, a time when industrial England ruled the world. But as ‘peak coal’ grew scarce, the country feared it would deplete its own lifeblood. Boosters dismissed the need for conservation and pointed to ‘high-tech’ steam engines, which improved efficiency, requiring less coal to generate more energy. Enter 29-year-old economist William Stanley Jevons. Over 146 years coal’s alternatives – wind, oil, gas, nuclear, solar, hydro, geothermal – all stepped in to fuel growth. And unlike coal, water has no substitute. To counter global water scarcity, governments and industry once again tout and subsidize efficiency technology.
Water Justice Needed in the Horn of Africa. Recently, I had the honour of speaking at a fundraiser for the victims of the famine in the Horn of Africa, organized by local health-care providers Dr. Farook Hossenbux and his nurse and partner Geri Hossenbux. Speakers included a representative from Doctors Without Borders, local groups raising money for the cause and local artists. Several mentioned the phenomenon of "donor fatigue" in this case and puzzled about why it was so hard to raise money for a crisis threatening as many as 12 million people, many of them children, while other recent disasters have been met with an outpouring of generosity. When I spoke, I addressed this question and said that the reason might be related to the narrative upon which most people in the global North assess this situation. Foreign acquisitions are forcing small farmers and peasants off the land depriving them of access to food and water. . © 2011 Maude Barlow.