Genetic Engineering a Solution to Future Water Wars
Forget about oil or gas – you should be worrying about the less discussed but far more concerning fact that the world is running out of clean, drinkable water.
I wrote this article while in Kathmandu. Nepal’s capital and largest city has a severe water shortage. Even though all homeowners pay a fee to the government to get water on tap, supplies run only once a week for a few hours.
Desperate residents are then forced to purchase water from private suppliers. While this is affordable for richer people, it’s a big problem for the lower and middle classes. For many in the developing world, water is really the difference between prosperity and poverty.
More than a billion people around the world have no reasonable access to fresh water. Most of the diseases in developing countries are associated with water, causing millions of deaths each year (a child is estimated to die from diarrhoea every 17 seconds).
EC/ECHO/Martin Karimi