Q&A: Selling the Nile’s Water
Selling the Nile’s Water
Question
Ethiopia is building a dam and reservoir that will reduce the amount of water in the Nile. The Egyptians are furious. https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/world/africa/.premium-MAGAZINE-1.8850493
What is the distinction between water sources and natural resources? In other words, why is it obvious to everyone that Saudi Arabia sells oil and Congo sells diamonds, whereas Ethiopia is not allowed to sell the water? Is it only a matter of brute force, or can this be justified (or does it reveal implicit/explicit assumptions)? For example, a distinction between “entities” like the river, or “possession” that is “part of nature.”
Answer
You can think of several parameters here. First, water is a basic existential need, unlike oil. Already in the Talmud there is a discussion about two cities that use a single spring, and the question whether one city may use it for laundry when the other has no water to drink.
Beyond that, there is the directness of it. When the water flows to Egypt, then it belongs to them as well. If there were an oil reservoir beneath two states, they would have to work out extraction rights so that one of them would not come and pump everything out. Water is not a local resource. There are rivers that run for thousands of kilometers, unlike diamonds or oil.
Discussion on Answer
The fact that one city needs water may impose an obligation on the second city to transfer it, but why for free? By the same token, I say this every time someone says that something is very very very very important to him and bothers him deeply (for example, blocking roads on the Sabbath, or not blocking roads on the Sabbath). As far as I’m concerned there’s no problem at all, and heaven forbid to do something that bothers someone else, but it’s always possible to compensate in some other way. Let the one who is not “entitled” to it kindly pay compensation instead (after all, if it’s so very important to him, he is surely willing to pay substantial sums as well). The same goes, by the way, for exemption from military service based on principled claims, etc.
Thanks for the reference to the Talmud; I think I’ll look into it.
The point about directness really does seem like the real explanation, but I have trouble seeing in it something “justified” (in a world where a strange fiction like “property rights” is considered “justice” — that what a person created/bought is “his” — and not just an organizational technique aimed toward the future).
By the way, even a country that has trees important to the world (Brazil, for example, after the global anger that it didn’t put out the fires fast enough) — I’m surprised it doesn’t play a game of chicken with the world and demand payment in exchange for exporting oxygen.
Ownership issues always come from positions of power
There’s nothing else there
There was also such a struggle in the Middle East between us and the Syrians over diverting the Yarmouk’s waters.