Alongside the large-scale floods that fill the news these days, millions of hectares and people around the world are being affected by drought, with large areas suffering from severe drought and fires. The current tenor of these tragedies can be summed up as the result of water wasted during surplus months and used wastefully in scarce months.

Once the water problem was much less severe: population pressure was low and needs were limited – societies not only had reservoirs to conserve water sources. It is not for nothing that every mountain peak from which a stream flows is considered sacred almost all over the world. Buddhist teachers preached the need to conserve even a drop of water more than 2,000 years ago. Nobody could have imagined that, in many places, water would cost more than milk in 2010. Water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource. And yet so many people waste so much of it every day. How has this come to be?

Let us go into the past and try to understand why institutions for common property resource conservation emerged in the first place thousands of years ago. People seemed to have converted problems of risk into ones of uncertainty and tried to reduce their control, by creating randomness in the way resources were accessed. My feeling is that the elders realised that by creating an artificial scarcity of resources through institutions, they could justify allocative rules that were fair and just. Also, if communities were to be created, then water points could become meeting points where social and cultural exchanges took place and communities created. Shared futures were thus designed.

The introduction of markets made the individualisation of resources inevitable. Immediate consumption replaced deferred consumption. Satisfying all our needs at our own place rather than at our communal place became a lifestyle, a power and status symbol. Wasteful and redundant usage became the next logical step.

We have now reached a point in which negotiations to find any common ground for our shared resource use have become so difficult that wars seem the only alternative. Yet, I submit that peace is possible – through shared use patterns, and the creation of frugal cultures that impose an artificial scarcity on those who are used to wasteful resource use. We have to create new rituals, new institutions, new fashions and new trends. Water is too precious to be wasted on the altar of consumerist urges gone haywire.

Text: Professor Anil Gupta

Professor Anil Gupta teaches innovation management at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. He is the founder of the Honey Bee Network (www.sristi.org), which collects and disseminates traditional knowledge and helps facilitate grassroots innovation. E-mail: anilgb@gmail.com

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Twenty years of Earth Summits and numerous dialogues of the Convention on Biological Diversity have done little to improve the situation of local communities that depend upon natural resources, or of the disadvantaged people living in abject poverty in biodiversity-rich regions.

In 1990 I wrote a paper, “Why does poverty persist in regions of high biodiversity?” Since then much more evidence has emerged to show that the regions with the most malnourished children almost completely overlap with the biodiversity-rich regions. How can we justify the billions of dollars that have been spent on inter-governmental panels with practically no change in the rights of, and opportunities for, these people? National governments and civil society must bear some responsibility for this situation and for changing it. I propose a few policy changes to make a small dent on the situation.

Every scholar, company or state agency collecting knowledge and/or resources from a local region must be obliged to share the findings, and the use they have put that knowledge to, with the local knowledge and resource providers. The default condition must be an acknowledgement of every substantive personal communication used in publications and/or product or service development. To date there has not been a very good record of benefit-sharing. Most companies using resources from tribal regions share hardly any benefit with the tribal communities, either in terms of knowledge, monetary or other material benefits, capacity building, etc.

An internationally co-ordinated research programme must be mounted to add value to local brews, local grains and other foods, many of which can provide a valuable source of nutraceuticals. Such an investment would pay for itself very quickly, and would have a strong poverty reducing effect. For instance, opuntia fruit provides a wonderful purple dye and a single cup of a drink based on it can provide half of the daily iron requirement of a person. The cactus from which this fruit comes is collected by the very poorest people because of the discomfort in harvesting the fruits. The genebanks worldwide lack such information.

We can all monitor our consumption patterns and identify the scope for using products and services provided by disadvantaged people in high risk environments. This is the only way we can connect our lives to theirs in a positive manner. Without doing so, peace and sustainability are out of question. The increasing recourse to violence by disaffected tribal people should make us realize the urgency of the current situation. Can the UN and other bodies not regularly disseminate precise indicators and information about how consumption in everyday life can be switched so that it supports biodiversity conservation?

Text: Professor Anil Gupta

Professor Anil Gupta teaches innovation management at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. He is the founder of the Honey Bee Network (www.sristi.org), which collects and disseminates traditional knowledge and helps facilitate grassroots innovation.

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