African Conference Promotes Progress on Water Sharing

The worsening state of the environment affects the African continent more than any other place, from a standpoint of how much humans are affected by droughts, flood, desertification, and other phenomena associated with global warming and climate change. Fortunately, government officials from many of these countries realized the importance of cooperation in such difficult times, and amassed in Libya for three days, to discuss how improved water sharing could lead to increased crops and less expensive imports.

Although the 960 million people-large continent can be home to one of the biggest crop productions in the world, poor irrigation systems and overall bad management of the national infrastructures have prompted severe food and water shortages throughout the continent, and forced it to become heavily dependable on foreign imports, which place it in the debt of the rich world.

Already, food purchase prices throughout the continent soared from $10.5 billion in 2005 to more than $49.4 billion in 2008, as global prices rose. The strain that these increases placed on the economy meant further cost cuts in various sections of the national budgets, which prompted even less investments in agriculture, infrastructure or irrigation.

The new meeting had the objective to promote cooperation between African nations, and to facilitate their exchange of resources, especially water. "Together we must find concrete and effective measures to address the issues of water in Africa, in a spirit of shared responsibility," the director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Jacques Diouf, said during the meeting, in front of delegates.

"There are countries that progressed in technology and human resources but have a deficit in natural resources, while others have abundant natural resources and lack the technology and human resources," added the director of urban development at the Community of Sahel-Saharan states, Wafaa Sahli.

Representatives also asked for the renewal of promises made by some governments in 2003, when the latter pledged to commit as much as 10 percent of their budgets to address the issues of bad farm management and ever-decreasing water supply.